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The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Bamboozled ISBN: 1-55410-678-8 Copyright © 2006 Evelyn Starr Coverart by Jane Sommers All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher. Published by eXtasy Books Look for us online at: www.eXtasybooks.com
For computer geeks everywhere…
Evelyn Starr
PROLOGUE
“O
h, now, will you look at this?” Shalom Wilson glared at her computer screen. “’When Sex Doesn’t Count’. And on my office computer!” Her best friend Carly didn’t answer. Didn’t so much as make a sound. And a quick glance over the low partition that separated their desks told Shalom why. Carly had received the same e-mail. She was sitting with her chin in her hand, reading intently, her brow puckered in an expression Shalom knew all too well and had come to half-fear. It was an expression she’d known ever since the very first day of kindergarten when Carly had been the nightmare terror of old Miss Carstairs who’d promptly retired, nerves shot, at the end of the year. Carly was about to suggest something outrageous. “No,” Shalom said as firmly as she could. 1
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“Whatever it is, Carly, the answer is no. Absolutely not. Not in a million years. Not in a hundred million years.” “See?” Carly tilted her head back to squint at Shalom. “That’s the trouble with you, Shal. You’re…well, I hate to say it, but you’re just plain boring sometimes.” “Boring is good.” Shalom dumped the inappropriate e-mail with a quick stab of her finger on the delete key. “I’m not interested, Carly. I was hauled to the principal’s office so many times I quit counting before the seventh grade. All because of you. I’ve been thrown off buses, evicted from an apartment, even spent a night in jail. But this is it. I’ve had enough. I’m not about to jeopardize the best job I’ve ever had just because you don’t have the self-control to…” “Well, I’m sorry as hell for all of that. You know I am, Shal. But you don’t even know what I’m going to suggest yet.” “I know it’s something that’s going to get me in trouble.” Shalom picked up a file and scowled at it, pretending to read. “That’s all I need to know. And I want no part of it.” When Shalom glanced up again a second or two later, Carly’s eyes had taken on a twinkle that was, if possible, even more alarming than the look of pure and unadulterated hell about to be unleashed. “I say we do it.” “Do it?” Shalom’s voice rose and she hushed it 2
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again immediately, automatically casting a furtive glance around the office. Searching for Matthew Snodgrass, the office manager. Her job was already on shaky ground, thanks to Carly’s recent escapades with the office PA system and a few distinctly unusual changes to the daily lunch menu announcement. The last thing she needed was for Matthew to catch her discussing sex with Public Enemy Number One on company time. Unfortunately, Carly had no such concern. Carly never had any concern. “I say we do it,” she repeated, all but leering at Shalom. “This thing says sex doesn’t really count if you do it in any of these ways. In any of these places or with any of these people. So I say we go out and have all the free and uncounted sex we can. I say we find men…any men. They’re all over the place, Shal. You’d know that if you got out a little more. So I say we do it every last one of the ways on this list.” “That’s outrageous.” Shalom returned her attention to the file…the legitimate, businessrelated one…on her screen. “Even for you.” “I’ll bet you,” Carly murmured quietly after a moment of two of intense and humming silence. Shalom didn’t look up. “There’s nothing you could possibly bet that would ever get me to…” “I’ll bet you the snowflake necklace. If I finish the list first and rack up the most points…one 3
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point for every item on the list, I get to keep the snowflake necklace. But if you’re the winner, the necklace is yours. Forever.” Shalom shuddered. She licked her lips, kept her gaze on her computer screen, and didn’t say a word. Carly would bet that. Shalom had coveted that necklace…a massive, antique Austrian crystal thing shaped like a sparkling crescent of interlocked snowflakes…since the afternoon they’d spotted it in an antique mall and Carly had bought it right out from under her. But she didn’t say anything. And she wasn’t about to. Because she wasn’t going to do anything. She was absolutely, positively, not going to try to have sex in all the ways it didn’t count.
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CHAPTER ONE
A
hot and gritty breeze slithered through the Smithfield parking garage, shoving ahead of it a wave of microscopic debris that pelted the backs of Shalom’s bare legs with stinging ferocity. Head down, her eyes slitted against the onslaught, she hurried on. Hurried toward her vintage Mustang, parked three-quarters of the way down the sloping ramp, with no thought but to reach the shelter it offered from the windborne cloud. Her footsteps rattled on oil-stained concrete, echoing with an odd, hollow sound that bounced back and forth between beams and pillars and every other flat surface in the structure. Why, she wondered with her heart suddenly missing a beat or two, was the garage so empty…of people, not so much of cars…at ten minutes after five on a weekday? Why did she seem to be so inexplicably alone? Despite oppressive July-afternoon heat, Shalom realized she’d been shivering. Almost 5
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uncontrollably. For several minutes now. It could be the holiday. Most likely it was the upcoming holiday… Independence Day, tomorrow… which had left the world so strangely barren and lethargic. Lifting her head, Shalom realized her steps had slowed as she drew near the Mustang, rather than speeding up as she might…should…have expected under the circumstances. And then two things happened. First, she saw a flutter of white from the Mustang’s door handle. A print-out of the sexdoesn’t-count-if e-mail, she discovered when she moved close enough to rip it away and scan quickly down the page. With the word ‘go!’ scrawled across the bottom in enormous capital letters, an outright challenge in red magic marker surrounded by a blizzard of crudely drawn but clearly identifiable snowflakes. And then the car, antique but always trustworthy before, refused to start. Shalom was cursing Carly by the time she climbed back out of the car and headed around to the front to lift the hood and stare at what she could only perceive as a tangled mess beneath. Carly had done this. Shalom was sure of it. Carly was responsible for both the printout and the car, though she felt reasonably certain Carly hadn’t actually done anything to the Mustang. She felt reasonably sure…more than reasonably 6
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sure…Carly wouldn’t know a carburetor from a lug nut Or would she? The idea that Carly’s father had, after all, been a mechanic stuck itself into Shalom’s head and wouldn’t be easily dislodged. Still, she had the idea Carly’s expertise lay in other areas. Like preposterous challenges. Like… “Car trouble?” Shalom screamed. Crumpling the printed list of all the ways sex didn’t count into a ragged ball, she thrust it deep into her skirt pocket so the man who’d come up behind her wouldn’t catch sight of it and get any wrong ideas. And in the same instant she whirled to face him, her other hand already lifting, already clutching at her throat. “Sorry.” He smiled, and Shalom’s first thought, blistering through her mind with all the speed and subtlety of a thermonuclear accident, was well, if I was going to accept this ridiculous challenge… The man who stood before her, juggling a slim black briefcase as if he didn’t quite know what to do with it now that he had it, was magnificent. Purely and simply magnificent…a football player, maybe. An athlete, certainly. At something round about six feet, he was the most delectable specimen of a man Shalom thought she’d ever set eyes on. Broad-shouldered and muscular, he had gleaming ashes-of-gold hair, the most gleaming hair she’d ever seen, tied back into a neat ponytail. His eyes were deep. Emerald. Like the deepest of forest pools reflecting unbroken vistas of greenery 7
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overhead. The deepest emerald eyes. And his smile…oh, God, his smile. It was white. Perfect. Engaging, and enticing, and alluring. The whitest and most perfect smile she’d ever seen. Carly couldn’t have made a better choice if she’d tried. Except for the glasses. Heavy-looking things with black frames years and years out of fashion, they made him look a little out of it. A little like the geeky boy down the street her mother had drafted against her wishes to take her to the Freshman Sock Hop when no one else had asked. So okay, maybe the glasses were the only thing about him that reminded her of the geek. But one thing was enough. The glasses had to go. “D…do…” Shalom’s voice wouldn’t come out right the first time, so she had to try again. “Do you ever take those off?” And then immediately, uncontrollably, she felt herself blush. “I…I…I mean…” And, Lord. She’d turned into a raving, babbling idiot. As if he’d only just realized they were alone together in a dim and secluded parking garage…strangely alone for this time of day, when the place should have been a hotbed of homeward-bound activity…the stranger backed off a few steps. “Sorry,” he said again, and Shalom 8
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realized his voice was as stupendously stupefying as all the rest of him. It was smooth, like silk. Rich like a symphony orchestra fully involved in Beethoven. Soft as a whisper in a cathedral yet strong and commanding as if this was a man used to being…well, strong and in command. “I didn’t mean to startle you,” he went on. “I just saw you with your hood open, and I thought…” Mystified, she blinked rapidly. First at him, then at the Mustang. It sat squarely in the center of a pool of grimy light with its hood open, neatly propped up on the little metal rod provided for that purpose. Had she done that? Shalom looked around quickly, furtively. Seeing no one else, she decided she must have, though she certainly didn’t remember doing anything of the kind. She really didn’t remember much at all of the minutes and seconds before she’d looked straight up into this stranger’s green eyes and had that shockingly runaway idea that if she was ever going to take Carly up on the sexthat-doesn’t-count challenge, she’d just found the man she’d like to take it up with. “Look,” he said, starting to sound just a little, just endearingly, helpless. “I don’t know squat about cars. But if you need help, I can’t just…” “I…I’ll have to call for a t…tow.” Shalom started to move past him, but he caught her arm to stop her. And the touch burned like a bonfire. The 9
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touch completely incinerated the symphony she’d been hearing in the background, playing a particularly inflammatory version of the Moonlight Sonata. “At this time of day?” He shook his head a little. “In this heat? You haven’t been listening to the radio. Parkway East, Parkway West, Liberty Tubes…cars are vapor locked all over the place. Traffic’s a real mess. You could wait here for hours.” Good. So he’d noticed the heat. That meant it wasn’t just her. That meant it really was hot outside. That meant it really was a simmering, scorching July Third in Pittsburgh, though Shalom suspected the outrageous quantities of sweat pouring down her back weren’t entirely due to the weather. She suspected it was one hell of a lot more due to emerald eyes and fingers on her arm that, light as they were and unthreatening as they were, nevertheless threatened to burn holes right through the sleeve of her thin cotton shirt. Pulling her arm free of his grip, she wondered why her body temperature didn’t even try to return to normal once the contact was broken. She wondered if it was already too late for anything at all to return to normal. “I’ll call the auto c…club from my of…fice,” she stammered, backing away a step or two. “I can wait there. Where it’s c…cool.” 10
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“I have a better idea.” The stranger looked surprised somehow. As if he hadn’t meant to say anything. As if he certainly hadn’t meant to take hold of her arm again. Or to be more precise, as if he hadn’t ever expected to find himself with her hand pressed between both of his. Shalom was a little surprised, too. She had no idea how that had happened. No idea what to think when the stranger smiled another of his devastating smiles and murmured “Why don’t you have dinner with me?” “Dinner?” Her voice rose, ending on a thoroughly embarrassing, thoroughly inexplicable squeak. “There’s a nice little place just down the street.” “I…” Shalom gulped. She knew the place. It was a narrow storefront on a narrow little side street. At the start of the year the place had been vacant and decrepit, a sad spectacle of paint-peeling pillars and swaths of dusty glass revealing an even dustier interior. Then Nasturtiums had opened. A trendy little place, it was as dim as ever inside, but no longer dusty. Certainly no longer decrepit. Now polished windows framed tiny dark-wood tables snuggled up to deep-green walls. Tables with white cloths and orange flowers at their centers filled what had previously been only dead, empty space. Shalom had been dying to go there. She’d been 11
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dying to sit in the gleam of frosted-glass chandeliers and sip white wine. If she’d only had someone to take her there. Someone to ask her to go there. Someone with emerald eyes and the whitest smile in the city of Pittsburgh… “I really don’t think it’s a good idea,” she murmured, her heart breaking a little at the realization that just when all her fondest wishes seemed likely to come true, she was going to turn down the man with the whitest smile in the city of Pittsburgh. Of course she was. Because she didn’t know him at all. He smiled again. He smiled wider. “I’ll be on my best behavior,” he promised. “And we’ll be in a public place. We’ll be in a crowd. So what harm…” What harm, indeed? Shalom gulped again. Now, where the hell had that voice come from? And was it actually telling her… “I just meant…” She backed off another step. Stretching her arm out because he still held her hand, because she didn’t want him to let go of her hand, she nonetheless backed off another step. Another two steps. “I was just thinking…I mean, I don’t even know your name, or anything ab…” His smile widened even more. Until it and the shimmer of light that accompanied it, a deepdown warming of emerald eyes, turned deadly. Until the combination was nearly enough to do 12
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her in. As if she hadn’t been done completely in to begin with. “I’m Nick,” he said, giving her hand a little squeeze. “Nick O’Hara. And you are…” “Nick, then.” Shivering, Shalom couldn’t look at him a second longer. Because looking at him engendered unexpected thoughts and undeniable desires. Looking at him brought her to the very brink of doing exactly what she’d told Carly she would not do, would never do…of doing everything she’d sworn she’d never in this or any other lifetime do. Still, she had the touch of him. She’d already come to know the feel of him, the warmth of him, the softly thrumming and perfect life of him. She’d already… But she couldn’t think that way. Didn’t dare think that way. “Th…that…” Shalom knew what she was going to say next. And didn’t have the slightest idea how to stop herself from saying it. She didn’t know if stopping herself was even possible. “That,” she said again, gulping painfully around a lump of what could only be sheer nerves that had risen to clog her throat, “would be lovely. Dinner, I mean. At…you know. Nasturtiums.” “Great then.” Nick released her hand at last. Bending, he picked up a briefcase Shalom didn’t remember noticing before, a dark leather thing 13
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that looked like it must have cost a fortune. A briefcase she didn’t remember seeing him place on the dingy concrete next to his impeccably shod feet. And she gulped again. Hard. In a way that seemed to seize her throat for an instant or two and send a bolt of shuddering, twisting pain all the way down into her stomach, where it lodged firm and immovable. Those were Gucci loafers, if she’d ever seen a pair of Gucci loafers. And the car he moved toward, keys already in his hand and dangling carelessly between his long and warm fingers…the car he bent to unlock and then to stow the briefcase inside… Shalom gulped again. She gulped harder. Much, much harder. The car was a Jaguar. A cream-colored one, sleek and shining. Sleek and exotic. Sleek and expensive. “Wh…what…” She could barely make herself heard. Even to herself. “I don’t want to go lugging that thing all over town,” he said, and she could have sworn he winked at her. Oh, this just gets better and better, Shal! Carly’s voice rang inside her head, and Shalom had to bite down on her tongue, had to bite down hard, just to keep from screaming aloud at the imaginary voice. Just to keep from yelling ‘shut up!’ in tones 14
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that would set the rafters of the parking garage to ringing and scare every pigeon within four city blocks into startled flight. And what good would it do to shout, anyway? As usual, Carly showed no inclination to shut up. Even if she wasn’t there and even if the voice Shalom was hearing, even if the words the voice just kept on crowing, was completely imaginary and completely of her own making. Go for it, Carly’s phantom voice urged. And God help Shalom, she was going to do it. She was at least going to try to do it. Try, because Nick O’Hara was looking at her again. He was looking at her strangely, with a question or ten in his marvelous eyes and a slight wrinkle in the equally marvelous flesh between them as his lips parted slightly, getting ready to give voice to the questions. Getting ready to give voice to something. “I was going to ask wh…what you do for a living.” God, he must think she was a complete idiot. He must already be regretting the invitation he’d offered so rashly. He must surely be getting ready to rescind it, to leap into his incredible car and roar away, never to be seen again. “Funny,” he murmured, the frown-wrinkles deepening just the slightest bit. Just the most unnerving, most incapacitating bit that… If she kept on like this, they were never going to make it to the lovely little restaurant in the converted 15
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storefront. If he kept on like this, they were never going to make it to anywhere at all except… Shivering, feeling a sudden, hot and unmistakable sprouting of flames in her cheeks that once again had nothing at all to do with weather, Shalom shook her head. Very slightly. She shook it once. Twice. And then she backed off another step, toward the seventeen-year-old Mustang that had seemed pretty sharp and pretty sporty until just about two minutes ago. Until just about the time her emerald-eyed prey…stranger…had pulled out his keys and unlocked his undeniably fabulous, creamy dream of a car. “I thought you were going to suggest something else,” he continued, looking at her like he thought she might be about to have an attack of some kind. Which, in all fairness, she really was. “I thought you were going to suggest…” Color rose in his face. Color every bit as bright and hot, and no doubt just as unexpected and unwelcome as the color that continued to burn in hers. Searing-hot color that sprang up first around his sculpted cheekbones, then immediately spread outward and downward. Color that spread into his entire face, along his squared jawline, and down his throat before disappearing into the scarcely imagined yet no doubt delightful regions 16
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beneath his pale blue dress shirt and dark blue raw silk tie. “You still haven’t told me your name,” he murmured after a very, very long time, when he seemed to at last regain the ability to murmur. And why the hell hadn’t he let go of her hand? Shaking herself, Shalom tried to find the will to pull away from him. But he held her tight. Seeming mesmerized in exactly the same way she’d begun to feel a little mesmerized, he held hers tight. He held hers as if he couldn’t let it go. As if he had no desire to ever let it go. When the hell had the simple touch of long and slender fingers turned into a gesture that was pure caress, pure electricity, pure lightning and crashing thunder? When had he moved so close to her that she could smell the soft and smooth musk of his… Don’t go there! a small voice…not Carly’s this time…cried inside her head. Just get your hand back and get the hell out of here! But Shalom had no time for little voices, crying or otherwise. If she’d ever had the time to begin with. For somewhere deep, deep, deep inside her mind the idea Carly had planted had taken root. And something that sizzled and shimmered in the brush of Nick O’Hara’s flesh against hers had begun to nurture that kernel of an idea so that it had already begun to blossom. Already begun to 17
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bear the fruit Shalom knew…knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt…she was never going to be able to resist sampling. Fruit that, once sampled and once enjoyed for the unearthly and spectacular delight it was, would be addictive. Fruit that would only make her want more. And more, and more, and more. If she didn’t resist. “Sh…” she tried, and discovered her throat had gone so dry, her tongue so swollen and clumsy inside a mouth that suddenly, inexplicably felt a dozen sizes too small, that all she could do was make that single, hissing sound. All she could do was struggle to say something intelligible, anything intelligible. Nick didn’t release her hand. If anything, a look of sudden concern and worry flickering through his emerald-lit eyes, he only held it tighter. Only clung to it as if his hands were some kind of lifeline and she was in serious danger of drowning in some kind of whirlpool that wasn’t ever going to let go. Ever. And wasn’t she? Drowning? Wasn’t she in a whirlpool of her own creation, or his, or maybe Carly’s? Because if it hadn’t been for Carly with all her outrageous and unrealistic notions… “Shalom,” she managed to blurt at last. The look of worry in Nick’s eyes only intensified. 18
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Because of course he didn’t understand. Not the way he would have understood at once if her name had been any of the things she’d long prayed it might have been…Mary, or Sarah, or even plain old Sue. Anything but Shalom. “It’s my n…name,” she stammered, wishing more than ever she could find the will or the strength to break the contact that held her entire body in thrall, helpless to fend for itself, helpless even to protect itself. “Shalom Wilson.” “I see,” he murmured, his grip tightening again. And Shalom knew he did. She knew he understood all of it…her mother’s feeble attempt to be creative and original when the one thing Amelia Wilson had never in her life possessed was a single really creative or truly original thought. She knew, too, that Nick understood how she’d been laughed at, how she’d been teased, and how she’d been forced to endure a lifetime of poor jokes about that name. She knew Nick understood that she’d spent a lifetime becoming terribly defensive about her name and terribly protective of it too, even if she did loathe it with most of her heart. “It’s a lovely name,” he said softly. “Shalom.” “My f…friends c…call me Shal.” “I see.” His expression turned very grave. Very intense and very, very serious. “And is that what you want me to call you?” 19
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“I don’t c…care.” Why in the hell couldn’t she look away from his eyes? Why in the hell couldn’t she break the strange and not entirely comfortable spell he’d woven around her with them? And what in heaven’s name was that spell, anyway? Sex appeal. That would be Carly now, crooning softly in the most inflammatory way possible. Carly, trying to goad her into doing what she knew she had no business doing with Nick O’Hara, stranger extraordinaire whom she’d met no more than five minutes ago. Nick O’Hara, complete stranger and complete unknown, even if he did drive the most gorgeous car she’d ever had the pleasure to see and even if his eyes…his sparkling, springtime, sunlit and star-shot eyes…were the single most incredible pair of eyes in the entire world. “I’d rather call you Shalom,” he murmured, drawing her an infinitesimal bit closer with the subtlest yet most irresistible pressure on her hand. “If you don’t mind.” “M…mind?” She didn’t know whether to nod or to shake her head. At this point, she couldn’t even decide if she should keep breathing. But Nick did it for her. Nick nodded, smiling again in that old, mesmerizing and intoxicating way. “Shalom suits you better than Shal. Much 20
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better. And I like the way it sounds. Shalom.” “C…call me what you want.” Spellbound, starstruck, caught and held by the magic inherent in his greener than green eyes, Shalom wished she could say something more intelligent. Wished she could at least think of something intelligent, or witty, or incisive. But there was nothing. There was nothing in the entire world now except the glimmer of emerald eyes as Nick O’Hara bent closer to her. And closer. Then still closer.
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CHAPTER TWO
T
hey weren’t going to make it to the little restaurant with the flowery name. Not this evening. Maybe not ever. That thought had been front and center in Nick’s mind from the instant his skin first touched the silken satin of hers. Why was it, he wondered, that women always had this effect on him? All women had this effect on him, but the beautiful ones like the one who stood before him now… Oh, Christ in heaven, what the beautiful ones did to him! “About dinner,” he began haltingly, more flustered even than he’d imagined when he saw the look on Shalom’s face…when he saw the slightly dazed and a little more than slightly baffled look of breathless anticipation stamped so clearly there. Anticipation that almost seemed like enchantment. 22
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“About dinner.” Shalom licked her lips and looked…Nick didn’t want to think she looked devious, because surely that wasn’t right. Surely he was mistaken about that. Surely what he’d so easily mistaken for a just slightly secretive underhandedness in her expression was in reality nothing more sinister than a look of the same bewilderment he’d seen there before. “About dinner,” he replied and wondered for a fleeting moment if this conversation was destined to stay stalled forever on those same two words…’about dinner’, ‘about dinner’, ‘about dinner’. And so on and so on, and so on. Right into infinity and beyond. “I don’t think…” Shalom licked her lips again. And oh, God, were they luscious lips. Fully formed lips. Ripe lips that just begged to be picked. Just begged to be plundered. She cast a look around, darting quick glances from exquisite, dark-rimmed pale gray eyes into all the corners of the dim and dusky parking garage that continued to be strangely ominously deserted… alarmingly deserted… for this time of day. Then she cast one of those looks at his car as another burst of the same unreadable and indecipherable something flashed through her eyes and expression. And finally she turned her gaze away. Quickly, as if the sight of the Jag he’d rented on a whim after his old Toyota had suffered grievously beneath the impact of a fully loaded garbage truck frightened 23
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her in some way. As if something frightened her. Terribly. She was planning to turn him down. She was planning to run. And Nick guessed she had that right. Most women would have run shrieking a long time ago…either that, or they’d have pulled out the mace and let him have it right in the kisser…if he’d approached them the way he’d approached her. In a place like this, where it was just him and her, and nobody else to hear…nobody else to help if he turned out to be something more sinister than what he actually was. In ordinary circumstances, normal circumstances, he’d never have dreamed of approaching her at all. He’d probably have turned around and gone the other way. Would most likely have waited it out somewhere safe until she’d either left the premises or been joined by others. Preferably a very large crowd of others. But there had been something about her. Something about the way she’d been standing the first time he saw her, with her shoulders slumped, staring down helplessly at her car. There had been something about the way she’d glanced with almost forlorn despair at the crumpled sheet of paper she’d held in one hand, her fingers tightened so hard around it that it had become less a sheet of paper and more…much more…a ball of useless rubbish. 24
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Whatever that something was, and Nick didn’t even try to kid himself that he’d ever be able to come up with a name for it, that something about her had suggested she was approachable. It had suggested she didn’t have any mace, and even if she did she wasn’t about to use it. And so he’d dared. To approach her, with his heart already hammering in his throat and his palms so sweaty he’d worried he’d lose his grip on the good briefcase his mother had given him for Christmas if he didn’t find a place to put it down…and put it down soon. “About dinner,” he said around a painful clearing of his throat. And wasn’t that great? Wasn’t it just Jim-dandy that they were back to that highly intelligent and more than scintillating line of conversation? Shalom’s eyes glazed over suddenly. Like she’d gone blind just that quickly. And when she stepped closer to him, when she stepped right up next to him where he could feel the full heat of her body pulsing next to his, it astonished him to realize he was still holding on to her. Was holding tighter than ever, in fact, so that when she tilted her head back, her eyes already fluttering closed…when she tilted her head back… Nick kissed her. It was as simple as that. Nick bent over, bent down, and he kissed her. Full on the lips. Releasing all the pent-up passion and longing he’d 25
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never in his life allowed himself to fully indulge since the one time…the one mistake. And yet it was so much more than that. It was… Beneath the claiming pressure of his mouth pressed hard to hers, Shalom groaned. A long and low groan, vibrant with so many kinds of need and so many kinds of wanting. So many kinds of everything he’d never completely felt before. Never completely known. “We aren’t going to make it to dinner,” she whispered. Nick wanted to agree. He did agree. But with the answering pressure of lips that burned against his, sweet with the taste of some delight like none he’d ever imagined…a delight so sweet and so impossible he knew no earthly or rational name for it…with that pressure exerted with almost killing force, Nick couldn’t make any move to agree or disagree. He no longer possessed a thought coherent enough to allow any kind of move except one. Blindly, groping behind himself, searching with a hand that fumbled badly and shook with some kind of terrible, terminal seizure, he found the Jaguar’s door handle. He managed to wrap his fingers beneath the tab and pull once, pull hard enough to open the door as a last functioning and sentient part of his brain breathed a fervent prayer of thanks that it was a rear door handle. That the rental car agency hadn’t 26
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had any of the XK8 sports cars he’d requested and he’d been forced to ‘settle’…as he’d thought at the time…for this X-type sedan. A very special prayer of thanks because a sedan, with a back seat that might not be generous but was nevertheless adequate, was going to come in handy right about now. His dick told him so. Because it was fully aroused. It had been ever since Shalom’s first touch had set this entire episode off to begin with. And now his dick was more than aroused. Now it had reached critical mass, explosive mass, and unless something was done to remedy the situation and remedy it soon he, Nick O’Hara, would not be responsible for whatever catastrophe might ensue. He was so aroused he hurt. And that thought…or was it the undeniable force of his arousal?…went straight to Nick’s knees. It turned them suddenly, irreversibly to mush. He fell backward. Sprawled along the length of the Jaguar’s rear seat. And because he’d kept his grip on the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, much less touched…because he’d kept his grip on Shalom…she fell with him. She fell on top of him, with one knee between his legs that had just naturally spread wide. The firm softness of her body came down snugly upon him. Upon the part of him that was least likely to be able to withstand that kind of firm softness or that kind of snugness. And when she came down 27
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on top of his stiffened and suffering, pounding and struggling dick in one single, fluid movement, he knew his fate was sealed. Her fate was sealed. Their fate was sealed. Because from that moment on, there was only one possible way out of this. Only one way that would insure his survival. “Shalom,” he whispered, his mouth moving very, very close to her ear. She lay still for an instant. No more. Only until gravity claimed her and pulled her down from her precarious and slightly off-center landing place to the floor of the car. Where she knelt. Next to him. “Wh…what?” She sounded dazed. Every bit as dazed as she’d looked a few seconds before, when… But a few seconds before didn’t matter. Not one tiny little bit. The only thing that mattered was now. This instant. This single, time-stopped and heartstopping moment when Nick reached for himself, intending only to make sure he was still in one piece. Intending nothing more than to make sure he hadn’t suffered some kind of internal nuclear explosion the way he’d feared he might and to make sure his dick, now pulsing with a kind of pain that surely had to mean complete and total destruction, was still intact. That was what he intended. But what happened, what he did instead, was incredible. Beyond incredible. 28
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It was something he’d never before done with a woman he barely knew…one he’d barely even met and had hoped he’d have a chance to get to know better. In a different way than it was now obvious he was about to get to know her. It was something, for that matter, that he’d never done with a woman he did know. Somehow, he freed himself. In less than the instant it took Shalom to groan her one-word question, he freed the soaring, quaking length of a dick gone absolutely insane. Somehow he was holding himself with a sweaty-palmed hand, already beginning to stroke at himself frantically, thinking only that he needed release. Thinking only that he didn’t really care how the release came because it was going to be quick, had to be quick. His gaze met Shalom’s. She still looked dazed. But that other expression was back now, too. The one he’d thought just a little devious the first time he saw it. Her expression was every bit as incomprehensible as before, though this time it lasted only a fraction of a second. Nick thought it lasted a fraction of a second, though he couldn’t be sure. Because time had lost its meaning. Time had quit somewhere back there between the tumble into the back seat of the Jag and the moment when his palm found his own desperate, seeking, straining flesh. 29
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There was no way to tell how long that expression lingered upon her face before it disappeared. Not when she ducked her head. Not when suddenly his heart damned near did stop, and all the breath fled his lungs in one single, long and instantaneous gasp of absolute shock. Of purest pleasure. Shalom ducked her head, and he felt a long and shimmery slither of lips opened barely wide enough to take him in, barely wide enough to accommodate a girth he thought he’d never attained before. He felt the warm wetness of her mouth surrounding him as, in that single long and swift stroke of electric and pulsing energy, she took his dick in and held it. And feeling it, he heard his own scream. Heard himself give vent to a mindless and thoughtless explosion of sound that seemed to reverberate back not just within the confines of the Jag but from every rafter of the parking garage beyond the still-open door. Every rafter that seemed to hum and shiver with the remnants of that scream long, long after it should have died away. Long after the garage should have subsided back into the unnatural quiet that seemed to have overtaken the entire world since he’d first caught sight of the lovely red-headed and gray-eyed creature who now focused every bit of attention she had upon the one part of him that needed that attention the most. The one part that needed it desperately. 30
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Lost, sunk deep within her mouth, his dick lunged. Getting itself ready. Getting ready to… Nick cried out again, and this time it was a lower sound. A softer and more wounded, hissing ‘shhhhhhhh’ of a sound that made no sense and yet at the same time made perfect sense. Because he was trying to say her name. He was trying to scream ‘Shalom!’ so that there would be no mistake who was doing this to him. Who was dragging her lips back along the dying and maimed length of his dick as slowly as she’d first plunged onto him. Who was dragging lips and tongue and teeth that grazed his shrieking flesh with the threat of violence, the threat of injury, the threat of still more to come. Even more to come. Shalom was making sounds of her own now, too…small and groaning ones that ceased only when she stopped at the very tip of him. That stopped only when she parted lips that had been just about to render him totally and permanently insane and pulled their delightfully encompassing softness away from him until he could no longer feel them. Until he could no longer feel anything but the worrying pressure of sharp-edged teeth that no longer so much promised violent action as seemed to begin to initiate it. With the head of his dick caught in the wet circle of her mouth, Shalom closed her teeth around that most sensitive of places, where head met shaft. And gently, implacably, she shimmered 31
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her teeth back and forth, back and forth, across the tiny membrane of the most tender skin he possessed. Nick lifted his head. He could barely summon the strength to lift it, but somehow he did. Only to discover he’d gone bleary-eyed beneath the sudden and pulsing onslaught of sensation that came partially from the mouth that still toyed with him and teased him and partially from the rising internal pressure of a dick that really was about to explode. “Shalom.” This time he did manage to say it, though the voice he heard through the rocketing sound of blood reaching his eardrums in an attempt to block out every sound, every cry and scream and word in the world, was not his own. It was the voice of a stranger. A beleaguered stranger on the verge of… “My God.” His head was too heavy to hold up. So heavy be could do nothing but allow it to drop back to the seat of the car, where it lolled helplessly, rolling a little from side to side as his hands fumbled to find the back of her head. As his body began to lose sensation in all parts except that one. All parts except that most important, most tortured part of all. “Take me,” he whispered. Tightening what had been a tenuous grip on her hair, he pushed. Tried to push. Tried to urge her to accept what he offered with a quick and jerky motion of his hips, 32
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tried to urge her to take it as deep into her mouth as she’d taken it before…so deep that his rising seed would have nowhere to go but there. No receptacle but the hot and lapping tongue that once again brushed his vised dick with tumultuously hot, tumultuously provocative and provoking strokes. His seed was rising now. It was rising inexorably, forced upward by balls that seemed to contract sharply, with painful twisting motions whether he was completely ready for such desperate contractions or not. Balls that suffered in that instant a darkly debilitating increase of pressure that felt like someone had kicked him. That felt like someone had used a football cleat, or maybe a steel-toed boot, to force the life from him. The life, the breath, the essence he wished he could hold back for at least a little while longer. The essence he wanted to give her only after he’d had a chance to savor the delicious heat of her mouth encompassing him again as the torture of clamped teeth eased and then vanished altogether. Oh, God, he wished he could be given a chance to savor this moment! But that was unlikely. That was impossible. Because the moment was already happening. His dick stiffened again. Stiffened more inside the mouth that shimmered over him and down the length of him in a way he couldn’t mistake for anything but what it really and truly was. 33
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The end. Shalom began to purr as she took him. Feeling the sudden kick of the shaft she’d held in a way instinct more than any experience told her no man would dare try to escape, she began to purr her satisfaction. So far, Carly’s little bet, or experiment, or whatever the hell else she might want to call it, had turned out to be a rousing success. Rousing, she thought and almost giggled. For the stranger inside her mouth was most definitely roused. Was most definitely… And then he screamed. He’d done that once before, she remembered. Thought she remembered. Then, the sound had echoed hollowly through the garage that couldn’t stay this deserted, couldn’t stay this empty or this private for very much longer. Now it seemed to wail down long ramps and corridors. Now it seemed to bounce back from every open stairwell, its sound increasing in both volume and intensity with every quavering echo, every quavering and quavered repeat. Nick screamed and his body tensed. His entire body, not just the delectable part of it that he’d allowed her to take into her mouth until there was no room for more, no room for anything else ever again. “Sha…” he screamed. His hips twisted. They 34
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lifted, as the tensing of his every muscle contorted his body. As the tensing forced him to thrust in the way instinct, coming alive again in ways it had never come completely alive before, told her it was a man’s instinct to thrust as his climax drew near. Nick thrust hard. Lifting his hips as the jerking motion of his shaft began again, began in earnest, he screamed only half of her name and shoved his shaft even deeper into her waiting mouth. He shoved so hard and so deep she worried she’d choke. Worried she’d gag. Of course she did neither. Amazingly, almost magically, she found room to accommodate him. Clutching at his hips with trembling, clawed hands, she took him all the way in and held him again. Stroking him with her tongue this time, she held him with lips compressed tight around the very base of him, around the suddenly pulsing place where his shaft joined his firmly muscled torso. She stroked him and she held him. Deep within her. And she waited for the inevitable, waited for… It wasn’t a long wait. “…lom!” Nick screamed the second part of her name in the tones of a man about to die an excruciating death, and his shaft jerked again. Jerked once, as a new and sudden, duskyflavored heat filled her mouth. Jerked a second time, pumping more and more 35
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of that dusky warmth, pumping incredible quantities of it deep into her throat. So deep that she swallowed reflexively. Swallowed and then, thinking surely her mouth must be empty of the clotting, smothering, heated essence he’d given up for her, realized there was more. He was pumping more. His hips still lifted in a tight and painful bow that thrust him deep into her mouth, he held the back of her head to make sure she wouldn’t escape. Held her tight, forcing her deeper onto him as he jetted more and ever more of himself into her. As he released more than she’d had any idea it was possible for a man…even an undeniably healthy and robust man like Nick O’Hara…to release. “My God!” he screamed and then suddenly, with no warning whatsoever and with a finality that was utterly heartbreaking, he went limp. His long and lovely shaft gave a final, halfhearted jerk even before the words left his lips, and in the same instant his body dropped away from hers. So quickly that even though she tried to follow it, even though she tried to retain the firm and surging hardness she’d barely had the chance to sample and had no chance at all to enjoy as it should be enjoyed, following was impossible. He fell back to the seat, his entire body gone limp, his hands releasing the torturous pressure they’d held on the back of her head and at the roots of her hair for…what? 36
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Two minutes? Surely no more!
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CHAPTER THREE
“C
arly, it was…” Shalom gripped the phone receiver tight with a sweaty, unsteady hand, and for the longest of minutes she couldn’t go on. Couldn’t make another sound. Because she hadn’t the faintest idea how to describe yesterday’s incredible, unthinkable encounter with Nick O’Hara and his cream-colored Jaguar that had seemed almost to glow with an unearthly, supernatural light in the dingy-deserted Smithfield Garage. “It?” Carly’s voice rang in her ear, suddenly sugary with false innocence. “What ‘it’ would that be, Shal?” Still unable to think of a way that would be adequate, much less believable to describe what had happened, Shalom stayed silent. “Oh. My. God.” Carly’s voice rose on a new and sharper note of impending, victorious glee. “You did it. As God is my witness, Shalom Anne Wilson, you did it. You took the bet! Didn’t you?” 38
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“Well, didn’t you?” Carly never missed a beat. “I was never the one in doubt,” she replied smoothly, her voice sinking back to a normal, if still somewhat silkily smug tone. “But you…what the hell happened, Shal? I thought you said you’d never even consider…” “I know what I said.” “So, then? What the hell happened?” “I met this man…” “Cut to the chase, Shal. I know there had to be a man involved. Because I know you’re not…I know you like men, and I also know there isn’t one of any consequence in your life. None you’d do the deed with, anyway. So come clean. Who was he?” Shalom wrinkled her brow. This was starting to sound worse and worse. This was sounding more and more like something Carly would do, like one of the things Carly had done, and all too often. The kind of things that made it necessary for Shalom to step in at the last minute and clean up the messes she made. And just who in the hell was going to step in now? Who in the hell was going to clean up this mess, with both of them in over their heads? “I’m not hearing an answer,” Carly’s voice said into her ear. “If you tell me yours, I’ll tell you mine.” “You…” Shalom’s voice was so weak and unsteady she had to stop for a minute. Had to swallow…the way she’d swallowed late yesterday 39
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afternoon, to get rid of some strange man’s sperm when it filled her throat and damned near choked her. Quickly, feeling the heat of distress and fury at herself for having done such a completely foolish and irresponsible…such a completely Carlyish…thing, Shalom bit back the thought. No. Not bit back. She’d never bite back anything again without thinking of… But she wasn’t going to go there, either. Wasn’t going to go down… She certainly wasn’t going to go down! And what the hell had this whole messy episode done to her ability to form thoughts, anyway? What had it done that now anything she thought and everything she thought reminded her only, exclusively, of the hot and pulsing length she’d held in her mouth so she could savor, all too briefly as it had turned out, the delightful promise of it? She was never going to be the same again. And it was all due to her ‘friend’ Carly. “Remember the snowflake necklace?” Carly inquired, jerking her…no, not jerking! Nick’s shaft had jerked, Nick’s shaft had… Shit, anyway. “If you ever want to own that gorgeous necklace that you love, Shal, you’ve got to tell me who he was.” Shalom sighed. She groaned internally, taking 40
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the greatest care to make sure the groan remained silent because to do anything else would mean giving Carly all kinds of satisfaction Shalom had no intention of giving. “His name was Nick,” she said after a while. “Nick O’Hara. And that’s about all I really know about him.” “I see. And where’d you meet this Nick?” “In the parking garage. My car wouldn’t start, and…” Carly didn’t make a sound. Not even a murmur of surprise or commiseration. But then, why would she? She’d known the Mustang wasn’t going to start. She’d had to know, because she was the one who’d caused it. Knowing Shalom’s complete and miserable ignorance of anything mechanical, she’d slipped out of work at some point, on her last break of the day most likely, or maybe during one of her interminable trips to the washroom. She’d slipped out and she’d done something to make sure the Mustang didn’t start. Because she’d known the odds were a billion to one that any help Shalom might choose to summon was going to be male. “You rat,” she hissed at Carly. Carly only laughed. “What?” she demanded in another tone of too sweet and completely unconvincing innocence. “You broke my car!” “What makes you think I even know how to break a…” 41
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“Your dad is a mechanic. And I’ve seen you change spark plugs, girlfriend. I’ve seen you change them quicker and easier than the young snots over at the Sparks Are Us have ever managed to change them. So, don’t you lie to me. Don’t you dare even try to…” “So, what if I did?” There wasn’t a hint of apology in Carly’s voice. Wasn’t a hint of regret or contrition, either. “I know you, Miss Stick In The Mud. You’d never have accepted my challenge if I hadn’t given you a shove.” Shalom felt her shoulders sag. Looking in the mirror across her bedroom, she saw them sag, too. Saw herself looking as dejected and downhearted as if she’d tried to accept the challenge and failed miserably. As if she’d not only been unable to attract the attention and cooperation of a man but like she’d been laughed at and publicly reviled just for trying. She didn’t look like a victor. Not at all. Not of any kind. “I guess you’re right,” she murmured, sighing. “I know I’m right, Shal. Now, fess up. You met this Nick O’Hara person in a garage. But what did he look like? What did you do? Besides a possible Number Sixteen?” “Sixteen? Carly, what the hell are you babbling about?” “On the list.” Carly’s tone changed to one of extreme patience. Extremely exaggerated and not 42
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entirely patient patience. “You have the list. I gave it to you.” “I threw it away.” Now it was Carly’s turn to sigh. “Number Sixteen is sex in a public place, Shal. Sex doesn’t count if it’s done in a public place. Now, what else did you and your Nick do besides have sex in a public place?” “He’s not my Nick. And it wasn’t really public. It was in his car.” “Ooooooh!” Carly squealed. “Better and better! I’m proud of you, and I take back what I said about sticks in the mud. Now, about this car…” “It was a Jaguar.” “Shalom! I am proud of you!” “The most gorgeous Jaguar. Cream-colored, and…” “Was it in motion?” “No. It was…” “What about a stick shift? Did it have a stick shift?” “How the hell should I know? We were in the back seat. And why the hell does it matter?” “Because if the car was in motion or it had a stick shift, that makes it kinky. And erotic. And that means it did count. So if it had a stick shift, you wouldn’t have any points yet.” “Carly, where do you get this stuff?” “From the list,” she sniffed, sounding more than a little wounded. “If you’d kept your copy, 43
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you’d know. You’d be able to follow along, and…so, I’ll give you that one. Number eighteen. Sex in a car. And what kind of sex was it?” “Carly!” “Hey, I gotta know if I’m gonna give you your fair share of points.” “The kind of sex matters?” Shalom was developing a headache. A real throbbing, pounding, jerking headache that reminded her of the way Nick’s shaft had felt just before… She had to stop that! Had to stop it now, immediately, for once and for all! But the effort only spooled her headache up another notch. Or two. “I…” God, how was she even going to say it? How, when her mother had taught strict reticence bordering on outright shame at the mere thought of discussing any matter that even came close to sex? How, when she’d grown up with a mother who’d seemed to believe it was shameful even to admit chickens laid eggs? Shalom groaned, knowing Carly wasn’t going to let this one go. Knowing Carly was going to pursue this one to the bitter end…was going to pursue it until she had the answers she wanted. To all the questions she asked. “I…sucked…him,” she admitted in a quavering and abashed tone of which her mother would be extremely proud. “Way to go!” Carly’s cheer was so loud and so 44
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unexpected that Shalom flinched, pulling the phone receiver away from her ear to avoid almost certain eardrum damage. “That’s a Number One! Right at the top of the list…oral sex does not count. So, was there any orgasm involved?” Shalom felt herself blush, facing for the first time what she hadn’t been able to force herself to face or even to recognize before…that there had indeed been orgasm. And it had worked both ways. That the tingling burst of warmth she’d felt down there between her legs hadn’t been entirely due to a July Third that according to the late-night news had broken every temperature record in the books. That she had… “Isn’t there supposed to be orgasm?” she asked meekly, wondering not for the first time if her good friend Carly was completely sane. If she was anywhere near sane and this whole idea was anywhere near sane. “You get some points if one or both of you failed to achieve orgasm, Shal.” Shalom hesitated. But Carly was waiting. Carly was a pit bull, and there would be no evading her now that she’d set her mind on knowing everything…every last, intimate and embarrassing detail. “No points, then,” she mumbled at last. Carly sighed. “Okay, so we have a Number One, oral sex. We have a Number sixteen, public place. And we have a Number Eighteen, in a car that isn’t moving and has questionable transmission. Anything else?” 45
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“Isn’t that enough?” “Hardly.” Carly sounded just a little smug now. “I figure my tally from last night was seven points, so you have a ways to go if you even hope to…” “Seven points? Why the hell am I not surprised?” “Even you have to be able to do better than three points, Shal,” Carly insisted and then fell silent. She fell silent for a long time, during which Shalom could almost feel her thinking. Patient because she had no idea what else to do with herself, Shalom waited. “So, was this a random act?” Carly murmured at last, sounding like she did whenever she wrinkled her brow and tried to think up plausible explanations for some outrageous action that couldn’t possibly be explained, not plausibly and not otherwise. “Because if it was a totally random act and you plan to troll on from here without ever seeing this Nick person again…” “Carly, where do you get this stuff?” “I told you. It’s all on the list. Which you would know, if you’d stopped to give the thing the study it deserved before you went off half-cocked and…” Shalom groaned. Now she’d done it. Carly had said ‘half-cocked’. And of course that conjured up all kinds of images of Nick O’Hara lying fully cocked and ready to go in the back seat 46
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of his delectable car. All kinds of images of what she had done next, almost without thinking, Of the way she’d… “Stop, Carly. Please. Just…stop.” “Tell me if you plan to see him again, and I promise I will.” “Fine, then. He asked me to go with him to Point State Park tonight. To hear the symphony and watch the fireworks.” “Too bad.” Carly sighed. As heavily and sadly as Shalom had sighed earlier. “Me with seven and you with a measly three. It would have been another point if you’d never meant to see him again.” “And just go on from here with another complete stranger?” Even to herself, Shalom sounded thoroughly shocked. “Strangers can be fun, Shal. It’s what I plan to do.” “I’m…” For a minute Shalom had to search for words. But there were none. None that could express the full depth of her dismay, anyway. “I’m not you,” she finally muttered in a half-hearted and almost defeated tone. “More’s the pity. So you’re settling for your measly three, then?” “To be fair, Carly, I didn’t know we were tallying points.” Shalom said it, and then she shivered. Because she sounded like she was really on board with this. Like she was going to go along 47
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with this wholeheartedly to the very bitter and no doubt very, very bad end. Which of course she was. Why wouldn’t she, when she always went along? When she always allowed herself to be dragged into things and then allowed herself to follow Carly right to the inevitably messy end. Always. Even though every time she promised herself she’d never do such a thing again. “I really think you ought to get a point or two for the Jaguar, though,” Carly mused. “Sounds like cheating to me.” Carly groaned. “And I know. You hate cheating. Abhor cheating. Detest and despise cheating.” “Cheating is wrong. Cheating is…” “Didn’t you ever wish, even for a split second, Shalom, that your mother had been interested in something other than going to church sixteen times a week?” “It was only four. Sunday morning and Sunday evening. Wednesday prayer service and Friday night vespers.” “Whatever. We’re getting off the track here. So I have seven points and you have five, since thank God you had sense enough to take him on in a Jag and that means he’s got to be rich as sin. And now tonight…” “Forget the hell about tonight, Carly. I’ve told you everything. I’ve told you more than I ever 48
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intended to tell anyone. So now it’s your turn. You claim to have these miraculous seven points, and I’d really like to hear how you claim to have gotten them.” “There’s not much to tell.” She sounded a touch smug again. “Seven points? There sure as hell better be something to tell for seven points!” “Well, let’s see.” Silence fell and Shalom could just picture Carly sitting back. Could picture her in one of her skimpy and sheer little Victoria’s Secret numbers that she wore even when a man wasn’t present…wore sometimes at the risk of freezing to death during the night because she claimed a ‘girl had to keep her frame of mind prepared for emergencies’. Could just picture her ticking off the ways she’d done it on red-tipped fingers as she clutched the phone between her chin and her shoulder. “I met this sailor in a bar.” “A sailor? In Pittsburgh?” “He was on leave. I think. He said something about a family in Squirrel Hill. I don’t know. I wasn’t interested in family, or names, or anything else that might get in the way of…” “Carly? You didn’t even get his name?” “Of course not. I was doing a Number Two. Not remembering the person’s name the next day. And a simultaneous Number Three, since I didn’t give him my name, so there can’t possibly be any 49
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calling back to have more sex. And of course it was a Number Twenty-Five.” “Number Twenty-Five?” Shalom inquired, wishing she didn’t have to…have to…ask. “That’s right. Number Twenty-Five A random act of sex. And it was a Sixteen, too.” “Sex in a public place?” Shalom asked, hoping she’d remembered the number right at the same time that she could hardly believe she was hearing herself say it. “Right.” “What kind of public place?” “I met him in this bar in the Strip. A real seedy kind of place.” “The Strip? Carly, what the hell were you doing in the Strip in the first place?” “Well, where the hell else was I supposed to find a one-night-stand nameless sailor to have mindless sex with, anyway?” “You’re disgusting.” “Never said I wasn’t.” Carly sounded cheerful. Completely unabashed and not the least bit offended. “So, like I said. I met this sailor. He was kind of cute, in an overly macho, sailor kind of way. And then we fucked.” “Just like that? Without any kissing, or getting to know each other, or…” Foreplay. Her mother’s inhibiting specter reared up again suddenly, pointing an imaginary accusing finger. And the vision was so strong, the 50
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shaking of that finger so stern and so righteous that Shalom couldn’t even force herself to say the word. “Well, of course, Shal. No kissing makes it a Number Twenty-One.” “You’re incredible.” “Of course I am. You could learn from me, you know.” Shalom ignored the last part of that. “So where did you do it?” she asked, congratulating herself on not falling for that particular piece of bait. “That was so public, I mean?” “In a phone booth.” “My God, Carly! Not one of those little wraparound things on a pole?” “No, this was a genuine, honest-to-God oldfashioned phone booth. With glass sides and everything. It was just outside the men’s room in the bar, and the drunks got quite a thrill out of…” “Carly! People didn’t see you?” “Well, why the hell not? I was fully intoxicated…that’s a Number Fourteen, Shalom. If you had your list, you’d know that. And anyway, where’s the fun in it if nobody notices? It’s not like I’m going to go back to that dive or see any of those drunks ever again.” “So you screwed in a phone booth with a bar full of drunks looking on.” “Until our mutual eyeballs popped.” She sounded cheerful again. Hopelessly, horridly 51
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cheerful. “I’m counting, Carly.” Shalom couldn’t believe she’d been doing it, but she had. She’d been ticking off points on the little pad she kept next to the phone in the unlikely event someone would have something important enough to say to her that she’d want to write it down for posterity. “That’s only six.” “Ahhh, but it was Number Seventeen, too. Phone sex.” “Phone sex?” Suddenly Shalom was in the game. Suddenly she was in it completely and fully, with rage rising in her voice at the sheer unfairness of it. “How the hell do you figure it was phone sex, Carly Stevens, if you were both there and touching each other in your disgusting, filthy…” “Well, it was a phone booth, Shal. I mean, come on!” “Phone sex implies the parties involved talked on the phone while you were…screwing each other.” “Well, as a matter of faaaaaact…” There it was again. That note of smugness, creeping back into Carly’s tone as she drew out the last word in a way that was meant to engender suspense but in reality only created a low and hot, burningcrimson fury in Shalom’s stomach. “Carly…” “The phone rang while we were fucking. Sailor 52
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boy was going to ignore it, but I told him we’d better answer or it would never stop. So he did. It was some chick…he said she was drunk…and she was looking for a little action. So sailor boy very nicely gave her phone sex.” “He…” Shalom choked a little at the image that conjured up. “…what?” “You heard me. Drunk chick wanted to know what was going on. So sailor boy very kindly obliged her. He fucked the eyeballs out of me and all the time he was giving her a play by play while I held the receiver to his ear. Et, voila! Phone sex.” She laughed a little, then. “And what the heck, that makes it a three-way, doesn’t it? Sorry, Shal. You got two points for the Jag that wasn’t on the list and the richness that owning a Jag inevitably implies. So I’m going to have to give myself an extra point for the three-way that wasn’t on the list. So now the score is…” “You’re kinky, Carly.” “Never said I wasn’t,” came the cheerful reply. “That’s eight to five, Shal, with me outstandingly in the lead. You’ve got some work to do if you ever hope to catch up.” “Who in God’s name says I want to catch up, Carly?” “Who in God’s name says you stand a chance of catching up, if you insist on sticking with this one man you barely know?” Well, at least she knew Nick O’Hara one hell of a lot 53
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better than Carly knew her sailor boy! But that didn’t seem to be the wisest thing to say, when Shalom knew Carly would only try to argue the point. So Shalom stayed silent. And then Carly argued it anyway. “You know,” she said with a note of archness sneaking in to join the smugness that had been in her voice for some time now, “my way really is better, Shal.” “Your way is disgusting.” “Hmmmmph. At least my way you don’t run the risk of developing all those messy emotional attachments that are only going to slow you down.” “Like I said before. You really are incredible.” Carly didn’t even miss a beat. “My way, it’s just two ships meeting…and screwing…in the night,” she declared on a note of undisguised and unmistakable triumph that left no room for a comeback. No room at all.
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CHAPTER FOUR
H
e’d halfway hoped Shalom wouldn’t be even half as hot as he thought he remembered. Not that he remembered all that much, after the way they’d just…shaking his head, watching her from the corner of his eye, Nick hoped like hell he hadn’t blushed all the way to the roots of his hair. How in the hell was he ever going to look the rental car people in the eye when he turned their Jag back in? Not that he really and truly supposed such a thing had never been done in the back seat of one of their cars before. Not that he felt entirely certain it hadn’t happened in the back seat of that particular car before. He’d halfway hoped that on second glance Shalom Wilson would turn out to be some kind of quiet and meek little dormouse who wouldn’t attract him at all. Because the heat of his passion, the heat of his response to the way she’d come on to him so suddenly, almost as if someone had been standing outside the car shrieking at her and 55
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daring her to come on to him and come on fast…the heat of it scared him. Scared the living crap right out of him. He’d never come so fast before. Never reached critical mass and followed so quickly with the explosion before. Punctual in his life, careful in his science and his work, Nick O’Hara liked to be deliberate about everything. He liked to take his time and think first. Liked to reason things out and make a concrete plan for moving forward. Liked to take each of the possible variables into account and then proceed slowly, noting each of them as they appeared and studying the effect they had on the long-term result. That had seemed the wisest course after his very first, disastrous initiation. When he’d been too young to know better…too young to really be responsible for anything. When he’d been way too rash and unprepared to give a minute’s thought to anything he was doing or what the consequences of what he was doing might be. So he tried to approach sex the way he approached his experiments in chemistry or nuclear physics. He always made sure the situation was carefully in check before he proceeded, always made sure it was completely under control and the entire operation conducted with all the solemnity and deliberativeness he felt it deserved. Above all, he always strove to measure outcomes and gauge the 56
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effectiveness of each applied action in its turn with the result that except for that one ill-advised leap when he’d been seventeen, sex had been nothing but dull. Dull, dull, dull. That was the only word for it. And for him. Dull. Right up until the moment the car rental agent had informed him with her brightest, buy-it-nowbefore-it’s-too-late smile that they were having a ‘sale’ on Jaguars this month, would he care to make the step up from his requested Crown Vic for only a few dollars more per week? Right up until he’d felt something snap inside his analytical nerd’s mind and said ‘yes’. And ‘do you have any white ones?’. Right up until he’d been striding through the Smithfield Garage, determined to take the blasted thing back immediately and say he’d reconsidered and could he have the Crown Vic after all? Did they have a mud-colored boring Crown Vic he could use for the next few weeks until he found another mud-colored boring Toyota to replace the one that was never again going to ramble on in nerdy-safe anonymity? Right up until he’d spotted Shalom bent over her candy-apple red sports car with her pert and…he had to admit it…all too enticing shapely ass stuck straight up in the air in a clear-cut invitation no man, not even the most hopelessly 57
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boring and nerdy of men, could possibly ignore. He’d gotten hard right then. He’d filled up the trousers of his Kaufman’s knock-off designer suit until he’d worried the somewhat less than designer quality zipper was going to pop right there and right then. Just pop open and let the old dick-ola run free. Which, basically, was what had happened anyway. The dick-ola had certainly run free. So now here she was and here he was. Here they were, walking across the graceful swoop of footbridge beneath the vaulted interstate underpass that was almost a centerpiece of Pittsburgh’s lovely state park, not quite touching and yet not quite not touching, either. Here she was, clad in her red, white and blue Fourth of July finery…in navy blue shorts that cupped that shapeliest of shapely asses perfectly, the little lines of white trimming on the hip and back pockets emphasizing the seductive and dickhardening sway of her hips as she strode along, looking neither right nor left, apparently completely oblivious to what was going on inside his prosaic… boring… pressed Kaufman’s knockoff designer jeans. Because his jeans were filling again. They were bulging at the front, threatening to explode just like his gray suit trousers had threatened yesterday afternoon. 58
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Here she was in her ass-cupping shorts and a little white star-speckled skinny-strapped top that made it clear with each swaying and bobbing beat of unrestricted breasts and clearly aroused, wildly and enormously aroused, nipples that she wasn’t wearing anything else. Wasn’t wearing any bra, and all he’d have to do…if he dared to do it… Nick’s dick jerked. It kicked. It grew a little more, a lot more. It pressed itself hungrily to the inside of his zipper, getting ready to figure out a way to slide the damned thing down on its own and set itself free. God, he wished he could set himself free! Just haul out the old wang and let it swing in the breeze as he walked along. Let it point the way, sticking straight out and proud, all but screeching at Shalom and anybody else who might be interested to ‘look at me, look at me! I was a nerd, but now sure as hell I’m going to fuck the hottest chick in the park before the night’s out! I’m going to find a place where I can fuck the hottest chick in the park in the park while all the rest of you munch on your fried chicken and listen to John Philip Sousa. I’m going to fuck her hard and fuck her fast, the way I’ve never in all my boring and repressed existence fucked anyone before!’. Because he was going to fuck Shalom tonight. Really fuck her. He wished. He wished he, Nick O’Hara, dutiful nerd only 59
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son of University of Pittsburgh Professor Emeritus Reuben Schuyler Toddman O’Hara, had the balls to even try to fuck her. Of course that wasn’t going to happen. Nick had already burned himself out yesterday in the back seat of the Jaguar, and knowing it, he could only adjust his stride a little to accommodate the growing heaviness inside his jeans and try to divert Shalom’s and his own attention before she noticed what had run so foolishly and hopelessly amuck. “I thought we could go down by the water,” he said, catching her hand and tugging at it a little as they left the bridge and the vaulted highway overpass behind. Luckily, she was looking everywhere but at him. Everywhere but at his swollen and distended crotch. “That sounds lovely,” she murmured distractedly, peering at the line of vendors who’d set up stalls around the wide space at the end of the bridge. “I’d like to buy a flag first, though.” Nick looked where she looked. ‘American flags, one dollar’. The booth, the biggest and gaudiest of them all, stood right smack dab in the middle. Right smack dab on the most prime piece of vendor real estate where no one could fail to notice and no one could fail to buy. Plastic flags, one big ripoff. Nick thought it, but he didn’t say it. He didn’t 60
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think it would be at all smart to say it. Because if Shalom really wanted one, he wasn’t going to fuck things up royally by telling her he didn’t think it was worth the dollar he already knew he was going to spend. He wasn’t going to fuck them up when she could easily turn right around and buy one for herself…not that he meant to allow such a thing…by telling her they were cheap and worth a quarter at the most. He merely paid the vendor. Quietly and unprotestingly while she dithered, her lovely face puckering with indecision as if all the flags displayed didn’t have thirteen stripes and fifty stars. As if she’d maybe find the odd and extremely valuable fourteen-striped one lurking somewhere in their flapping, fluttering, festive midst. He paid the vendor and then moved on with her when she tugged at his hand, toward the food stalls, wondering the whole time what the hell had come over him. He wasn’t usually cranky like this. Wasn’t usually cheap, either. He had the Jag to prove that. And he certain as hell wasn’t usually so negative in his outlook. It had to be the pressure in his jeans. That was the only thing different about him today from yesterday. That, and the sweat that had begun to pour out of him, making his 61
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Pittsburgh Steelers tee shirt stick to his back like it had been glued there. And hadn’t that been a stupid choice? Ninety-seven degrees in the shade, with the usual Pittsburgh ninety-seven percent humidity, and he’d had to come out to the park in a black tee shirt? Stupid, stupid, stupid. Watching Shalom in her skimpy-strapped little starry shirt, he wondered that she could look so cool when the air was thick enough with heat and moisture to cut with a knife. Of course, she didn’t have this weight inside her pants, did she? She didn’t have some live and vicious beast of prey trying to drag her down and stabbing at her with a hundred Ginsu knives at every step. Nick didn’t have an idea in hell what women did feel when they got hot to trot and ready to go steady, but he sure as hell believed it couldn’t compare to the agony a man felt when he found himself caught up in the same situation. “Let’s sit here,” she said suddenly, pointing to an unoccupied park bench beneath a thick canopy of trees whose branches, intertwined above the walkway, formed a blessedly cool and miraculously dark tunnel. “Sounds good to me.” Nick eased himself carefully…oh, so carefully, with that swollen rod still demanding its freedom and still refusing to take ‘no’ for an answer…down beside her. And watched as she opened the paper bag containing 62
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the food he scarcely remembered buying for her. He watched, breath-held and awestruck as Shalom took an enormous bite of drippy and gooey barbecue sandwich. Watched spellbound as she chewed thoughtfully, licking her lips first and then, to his complete dismay and his dick’s complete delight, licking each and every finger in its turn. Licking them all so carefully and so completely. Licking each of them exactly as she’d yesterday licked his… “What?” Shalom swung her head around to stare at him with enormous dark-rimmed gray eyes that widened in what looked like astonishment. “Did you say something?” “I…” Only then did Nick realize he’d made a sound. Watching her lick her fingers and imagining the hot and moist flicking of that tongue across parched and needful flesh that wasn’t going to stand for much more of this insane torture, he’d made a little rasping, coughing, gargling sound of futility that even now seemed to hang between them in the sultry, twilit July air. A sound that seemed to insist in no uncertain terms, the way his dick had insisted before, ‘I’m going to fuck you as soon as the sun goes down. This time I’m going to stick my dick into you and I’m going to…” Suddenly terrified, Nick dragged his gaze away from hers with an effort he could almost hear…an 63
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effort that seemed to actually rip the thick and stifling late-late afternoon air. “I hope it gets dark soon,” he muttered instead, lamely. “Well, it usually does.” She’d continued with her sandwich. Continued munching and licking, though he certain as hell didn’t have balls enough to look around and check to make sure of it. “It gets dark just about this time every day.” Then silence fell. Silence as thick as the air that surrounded them with its moist and heavy heat…silence as thick as the twilight that, now begun, was darkening at near-record speed toward the night and the darkness that would be lit with fireworks above and, he fervently and sincerely hoped, with a few choice fireworks inside, too. Silence as thick as the stream of notes that rose like liquid silver shot with beads of purest gold from the symphony on the stage at the other end of the park’s wide lawn, down by the towering fount of water at the Point from which the park derived its name. Silence as thick as the burning of desire that rose up inside him at the mere thought of the way Shalom would feel against him and around him. Not the way she’d felt before, when it had been her mouth offering suggestions of how she might feel. This time Nick thought only of the way she would really feel. The way her body would snug itself so tightly around him. The way those 64
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enormously swollen…permanently erect, it seemed…nipples would press against him and she would cling perfectly to him. With all the wet heat and unbridled lust of other flesh. Flesh designed explicitly and exclusively to cling. With all the lust she’d hinted at before. This time he thought of the way she would take him in and show him things he’d never dreamed could happen. Things he’d never imagined because there had been nothing in all his nerdy and boring existence to let him know he should be imagining them. “We should find a place,” she murmured, getting to her feet and tugging at a hand that felt the touch as a burning and searing, an almost agonizing sensation against flesh that otherwise had gone strangely numb and strangely unresponsive as his trapped and shrieking dick did exactly the opposite. As his dick grew even more sensitive and one hell of a lot, one hell of an uncontrollably lot more responsive. Looking down, he saw that she’d taken his hand. She’d finished with her sandwich, thank God, and tossed her rubbish away into a polemounted can that stood a few feet away on the other side of their dark leaf-tunnel. She’d finished with it, and then she’d taken up with him again. Locking her small and incredibly hot, incredibly strong for all their apparent fragility, fingers around his. Fingers brushing fingers, fingers twining tight between fingers, fingers trembling 65
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against fingers as they exchanged impossible electrical currents in impossible and improbable ways. A place for what? That was his subconscious speaking now. Had to be, since his conscious mind had long since lost any ability to make speech. “The fireworks will be starting soon,” Shalom said, tugging harder. “We won’t be able to see them here. We won’t be able to see them through the trees. We should go down by the water and find ourselves a place to…” “No!” The water wasn’t a good idea. Not at all. Not even if he hadn’t been all tied up in knots over the things Shalom was doing to him and the things he’d begun to want in every way it was possible to want to do to her. The water wasn’t a good idea when he’d have to look across it at the empty and denuded plot of land where Three Rivers Stadium had stood. Where his dad had taken him as a kid, to sit in the ‘nose-bleed’ seats on the very top tier where any loss of balance or a missed step might result in a neck-breaking tumble back to the bottom. Where he’d spent so many delightful hours cheering on the Steelers in their season and the Pirates in theirs. Even without the distraction inside his jeans, he’d never be able to bear looking at the place where the old stadium had stood, couldn’t bear to 66
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look a little farther off, to the new and gleaming one that would never be the same. Never replace the one that had been lost. Not even without the need that still grew and spiraled inside him. The need for Shalom. The need to touch her. Hold her. Kiss her, and… “Let’s stay here,” he suggested, drawing her back to him before she’d taken more than a step or two. “But the fireworks! They’ll…” Leaning over her, crushing her to his chest and marveling at the taut smallness of her, at the way she made him feel suddenly large and completely masculine in a way he’d never really felt before, at the way she made him feel so potent and not nerdy at all, Nick laughed softly in the last instant before pressing his mouth to hers. “There will be fireworks,” he promised, lifting his head again to sniff the top of her sweet-scented copper-penny hair. And to nuzzle it. “I promise there will be fireworks, Shalom. I promise there are already fireworks. And not just in the sky.”
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CHAPTER FIVE
A
nd there were. Fireworks. Nick hadn’t expected such fireworks, but as soon as his lips touched hers he knew he was in for the ride of his life. He’d remembered Shalom tasted sweet. Softsweet, like wine in the summertime. Like the sweet cherry wine his dad liked to make in the basement and serve to the entire family on special occasions, even watering it down so Nick could grow up the way he’d said children grew up in ‘the old country’…knowing wine and respecting the beauty and sanctity of it from their earliest days. He’d remembered the taste of her and the satiny-smooth feel that seemed an extension of that taste. But he hadn’t remembered fireworks, and he thought he would have. If they’d been anything like this. Nuzzling her hair at first, he brushed his lips slowly down the side of her face, skimming its 68
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silken surface with all the deliberation and attention he’d ever given anything. And he marveled again at the wonder that was her. Marveled that she was the first woman…the very first, maybe, in all the history of men and women together…who’d ever felt exactly this way in the circle of his arms. Exactly this delightful, this desirable, this perfect. His lips brushed the softest skin he’d ever encountered, right there at the corner of her eye. And then, still skimming down and down and down with only one goal in mind, one ultimate and irresistible goal, they found even softer flesh, even more delectable and delicious flesh, at her earlobe. Flesh so soft that he paused for a moment to nibble. Flesh so soft that he paused long enough to realize the soft tip of her ear tasted exactly like he’d remembered the rest of her tasted. Paused long enough, too, to elicit from her a soft groan of pure and needful agitation as he caught her earlobe between his teeth and began to stroke it gently, in much the same way she’d stroked his dick before. Pure and needful agitation that matched his exactly, that summed up part and parcel of the things he’d been feeling and been unable to express in any way. At the thought of it, his dick stood straight up. Not that it had ever completely relaxed after he’d 69
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left her yesterday, making sure the tow truck arrived and she had a ride home. Not that it had let him have a single instant’s peace after he’d gotten in his car, in much too much of a mistyeyed and shattered daze to have driven at all and wandered home to his lonely and barren bachelor’s apartment atop Mount Washington. Where he’d spent the longest and most tortured night of his entire nerd’s life. His dick had been standing straight up, had been swollen to the point of constant and quite possibly terminal agony since the first instant he’d set eyes on her. And the taste of her earlobe in his mouth now, the feeling of the soft morsel of flesh held between his teeth where his tongue couldn’t help but begin to brush against it, the feeling of all of her pressed hard and tight against all of him was too much for him. Nick answered her groan with a heart-felt rumbling of his own. And resumed the course he’d originally set. Releasing her earlobe, he skimmed again. Skimmed downward twice as gently as before. Twice as purposefully. His goal was so close as his lips flickered lightly across the firm and smooth line of her jaw that the touch teased his flesh every bit as much as he’d meant to tease hers. Into a long and uncontrolled series of shivers that must…surely must…shake the ground beneath their feet. 70
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Far off…far, far off, in some distant and all-butforgotten galaxy made up of crowds and holidays and normalcy, the Pittsburgh Symphony broke into a pulse-pounding version of Stars And Stripes Forever. And dimly, as if heard from another county or maybe even another state, the first thunder of fireworks burst in the uncommonly clear and brilliantly starry Pennsylvania night. Burst and reverberated, the resulting shockwaves bouncing off buildings and bluffs in every direction. And still Nick skimmed. Still he avoided his ultimate and final goal as religiously as he’d set his sights and his every last desire deliberately upon it. Upon only it. Down, down his lips swooped, moving ever more slowly and ever more lazily as they drew ever closer, heart-stoppingly closer, to… Shalom moved her head. It was the tiniest of movements. Tiny enough to have not really been a movement at all. And yet it was a movement so large, a movement so profound, that it changed his life entirely and forever. It was a movement significant enough to have the exact effect he’d desired even as he’d been deliberately denying himself the pleasure of achieving that desire. Shalom moved her head the tiniest bit. And her lips found his. The first brush, almost a whisper of a brush, 71
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was accompanied by a bursting of green and gold light. Light, Nick thought, that had to come from inside his head. Though of course he couldn’t be sure. Of course he could hear the cannonade of fireworks exploding in the sky, loud enough and persistent enough to drown out even the soaring and stirring notes of the symphony launching itself into what had long since become the Pittsburgher’s favorite performance of the year…the Fourth Of July performance in Point State Park. But the fireworks he saw, the fireworks he felt in every single fiber of his overextended and overanxious body, were like none ever seen before. Not by him. Never by anyone else. The greens of these fireworks were deeper. Were more verdant and more glowing, and the golds were more perfectly sparkling than any gold any man had ever created in the past or would ever create in the future. The greens were soul-soothing even as the golds were scintillating. And now they were accompanied by a flurry of reds in different shades. Reds ranging from a glistening almostwhite pinkish hue all the way to the deepest, most visceral and exciting shade of blood. Reds, as Shalom opened her lips. As she brushed her tongue against his and urged him to open to her. Their tongues met. Had they met before? That first time, in the dank oiliness of the 72
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parking garage, had their tongues touched and brushed and sizzled against each other? Or had it been only their lips? Only the kind of passing glance of a kiss that mesmerized and appetized without ever offering hope of fulfillment? Without ever offering the hope there could be anything else, anything more, the way Shalom’s open and suddenly greedy mouth offered all kinds of hopes now. For all kinds of things. Nick groaned again. He felt his heart try to stop when a particularly loud fusillade of fireworks, both real and imaginary, was accompanied by a roar from the crowd gathered on the park’s lawn not fifty feet from their hidden leaf-tunnel. He felt it try to stop when small hands found him. When they dispensed with zipper and jeans and underwear as if by magic, shoving them all down and away so that the resulting sizzle of sultry night air against pleading flesh was replaced immediately, shatteringly, by the sizzle of small hands surrounding him. Small and determined hands enfolding him and caressing him. His dick screamed, exactly the way he wanted to scream. Exactly the way he would have screamed, arousing the nearby crowd from its murmuring approval of the fireworks display that didn’t begin to match the one going on inside his head and spreading to his entire body with the touch of Shalom’s hands. His dick screamed 73
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exactly the way he would have screamed had her mouth not been pressed tightly over his, greedily over his. Had she not been exploring every single depth of him with a tongue just as greedy and just as insatiable as her hands and her lips. His dick screamed, and he could only moan in response. And then it was his turn. Then, acting as if they had minds of their own and wills of their own, his hands found the waistband of her shorts. Delighted to realize there were no zippers here, no snaps or buttons, nothing but a soft encircling of elastic that pulled free at his touch, he shoved her shorts down. Only as far as he needed to shove them to reach the very real silk of her underwear. And then he shoved that down too. Then there was nothing but Shalom beneath the trailing hem of her star-spangled top. Nothing but the softest silk he’d found in all his life, embroidered with the sweetest lace that was made up of nothing but tendrils of shimmering night air and the distant sparkle of fireworks and the softer than soft whorls of hair he parted slowly, parted swiftly, parted with fingertips that suddenly shook, aching and burning for what they knew lay beneath. What they needed to find beneath. Shalom’s hands wrapped around him. One of them wrapped around him as the other slid away to find and cup the weight of his balls…the 74
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terrible and unbearable, fully full weight of them. Her mouth fastened more hungrily upon his as her hands began soft massage, teasing his balls to fill even more and teasing his shrieking and crying dick to harden even more. Her hands wrapped around him and his fingertips found the most intimate parts of her. They parted her. Stroked her as she pressed hardtipped…for the most fleeting of moments he thought they were oddly hard-tipped and oddly irregular…breasts against his chest that had yearned for so long to feel that pressure. And behind them, above them, all around them, the music reached an all-new peak in its exuberation as finally, finally, he made his way inside her. As he shoved gently but inexorably with one finger, dipping between the softest folds of woman he’d ever encountered, only to immediately follow that first probe with a second finger. Two fingers. Reaching inside her as she purred and moved against him, the already tight points of her nipples tightening even more and standing out even more…even more inexplicably irregularly…as her body subtly but unmistakably increased the scorching urgency of the smooth stroking she’d begun along the length of him. Nick reached inside her and, guided by a telepathic radar that couldn’t fail because it was a radar that sprang entirely from her, entirely from the quivering and moistening cavern that lay at 75
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the very center of her, he found the place. The one place where he could stroke. And stroke. And stroke. Urging her body to tighten more. Feeling it quiver as it obeyed. Feeling it begin to quake and moisten again and anew in the most promising of ways and the very most delightful. “Mmmmmm,” she murmured, never withdrawing her mouth entirely from his and never giving him more than the slightest split second to catch his breath before she claimed him again. “Mmmmmm,” he replied, wondering if this was the way all their conversations were destined to proceed, for now and for as far into the future as he dared to look. Wondering if they were meant simply to parrot the same simple phrase back and forth from one to the other. If they were destined to never make any real sense, never make any real headway, because this was… So sudden. Nick couldn’t believe how sudden. Two days ago he’d been treated like a brother by the women in his life. And that was the way he’d wanted it. Two days ago, he’d been nervous around them, automatically shoving his deliberately unattractive glasses back because he’d inevitably begin to sweat a little and they’d inevitably begin to slide down the bridge of his nose. Forcing him into that completely unattractive and completely aggravating nervous 76
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habit. Two days ago there hadn’t been a snowball’s chance in hell that he’d ever find himself standing in the darkest tree-shadows of Point State Park with half the population of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania seated in ‘oohing’ and ‘aahing’ fascination less than the length of a football field away. Two days ago, his dick hadn’t had a chance in hell of feeling such thunderous heat, of simmering and scorching pulse as it beat within the circle of fingers that manipulated him easily and expertly toward an end he hadn’t two days ago stood a snowball’s chance of ever imagining. “God,” he murmured, the word all but lost in the plundering persistence of the mouth that would not let his go. The mouth that would not let him say more until he made the greatest effort of his life, the most taxing and tormenting, and turned his face away from hers. “God,” he said again as his fingers slipped deeper, slipped impossibly deep and impossibly perfectly, into the depths of her that were not silk and satin at all, not like she was on the outside. Depths that were composed of some substance indescribable to him. Some velvety substance made up partly of drifting steam and partly of dense fog. Partly of clinging fabric and partly of half-remembered fantasy. Surely, no woman had felt like this before. 77
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He would remember if they had. And just as surely, none had ever tightened so wondrously around his searching fingers. None had ever writhed so softly against him, brushing her electric-tipped nipples against his chest and tightening her grip upon his dick even more, so that she could stroke even more. None had ever murmured such wordless sounds of acquiescence as she pressed her mouth close to his ear to return the initial torment with which he’d aroused her…the torment of teeth scraping gently and persistently against his earlobe. “Nick,” she whispered, and it was all he could hear. The sound of his own name slipping easily, slipping naturally, from full and lush cherry-wine lips. The sound of his own unremarkable and unimaginative, down-to-earth name slipping from the lips that had rocked his world and changed it forever. Twisting his fingers gently inside her…oh, so gently, since the last thing he’d ever want to do was inflict real pain…Nick found the pulsing treasure buried inside. He found the small but allimportant kernel. He found it and then he stroked it. Once. And marveled at the sudden jerking of Shalom’s body as she emitted another short and wordless, though a much louder and much more impassioned, cry. “Shalom,” he murmured, seeing no real reason now why he should ever want to break their 78
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pattern of repeating and endlessly repeating. She shivered in the most delightful way. Shuddered, her hand tightening again to the point of inflicting very real pain and very real damage, around the dick she clung to as if it was the last stable and reliable, the last unmoving point, in a world he wanted to change to quicksand. A world he wanted to change so it would grip her inescapably in exactly the way the tight internal muscles of her trembling body tried to hold his hand. Tried to prevent its escape when he began to pull it back, removing fingers that had found their mark and wanted only to tease it now. Wanted only to play with it, and to… She shivered. She tightened. She said his name again in a whispering and unearthly quaver that might actually not have been a word or a name at all as much as a formless plea for mercy. She pressed the upper half of her body tight against the upper half of his, seeming to need to lean against him just to maintain her balance. And she murmured in her softly provocative way things he could not understand. Yet which he understood perfectly at the same time. Because they were the same things he wanted? The same pleas he wanted to make, if this were the time or the place to be wasting his precious energy on pleas? Shalom pressed against him and he rewarded her in the only way he could think to reward her. 79
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With another thrusting of his hand upward. Into her. Into the deeply soft and increasingly misted flesh he sensed could be his. Flesh he sensed already was his, if he would only ask. Flesh he could take easily and with her full cooperation, if only he could manage to find his wallet. If only he could manage to find the protection he’d carried there religiously since his first and only, thoroughly disastrous experience with fatherhood. If he could only manage to rip open the tough foil and remember how to manipulate the thing…remember how to snug it onto himself when his hands shook so badly he could barely control them. When his one hand, his forever lost and forever incapacitated by the wonder of what it had found hand, would never in a million-billion years be persuaded to leave its delectable and toolong-resisted prison to do such a thing. Beneath his touch and against his body, Shalom softened again. In the most miraculous way. She softened entirely as his fingertips, the two of them, slipped upward and inward again, finding the small and raised nub of flesh at the heart of her. As they brushed across it with diabolical deliberateness this time, barely touching it in their desire to provoke. Barely touching it in their heartfelt desire to arouse her to greater heat and greater urgency. To arouse her to the height instinct told him she was capable of being aroused. The height she might reach…would 80
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reach…with very little more persuasion, very little more coaxing. He stroked the quivering nub again, and the softening in her and of her changed. It became a strangely exotic and oddly beguiling sense of some kind of flowing. Not of her essence. Not exactly. This was more like a rippling of her flesh. More like a breathless transformation of what had been silk-and-velvet yet very real and very human flesh into something else. Something he’d have called divine if ‘divine’ was a word he ever used. And, what the heck? What the hell? ‘Divine’ was a perfectly good word. A perfectly descriptive one. There could be no other word to describe the soft and creamy moistening of flesh that continued to respond to his caresses, flesh that opened even wider when he suddenly, completely, on an unplanned whim, thrust his probing fingers deeper. When he thrust them all the way into her, marveling at the depth and the resounding warmth of her. “Nick?” she said again, and this time it sounded like a question. This time it was a question. “What, my love?” He murmured into her ear. Murmured as softly as he could, knowing the murmur would inflame her, knowing he was 81
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going too far and had already gone too far. Knowing… “I don’t…think I…can…” Shalom’s movement was so sudden, though hardly unexpected, that Nick never stood a chance. Never stood a snowball’s chance. Groaning again, a deep red murmur of sound made up entirely of sheer and unadulterated need for him, Shalom pulled herself away from him. She dropped her hands from him, dropped her hands from his dick and explosively charged balls, and caught his wrist. Caught it to tug it down and away. So that he lost her. Lost all of her as she stepped back, her breath rasping sharply in a tightened and still-tightening throat, her unseen expression surely one of absolute horror as she said “Nick!” again, louder. Said it almost loud enough to attract the attention of the crowd, had the symphony not been thoroughly launched and thoroughly involved in God Bless America. “What?” he asked, his own voice a tormented shadow of its normal self as he felt himself begin to lose his balance. As her hands came up to his shoulders, glimpsed only as a fleeting pale and swishing blur in the complete darkness inside the tree-tunnel. As they pushed him backward and down, onto the rough park bench she had to have located with more of that telepathic radar since there was no seeing anything now. 82
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Since there was nothing to see but a renewed and even more remarkable bursting of fireworkflowers inside the lids of Nick O’Hara’s tightly closed eyes.
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CHAPTER SIX
H
e fell back gracefully. Fell back a little heavily and with a small protesting sound, onto the park bench Shalom remembered was there…the one she remembered they’d sat upon while she’d finished her sandwich and Nick had begun to behave strangely. Or had she only imagined the strangeness? Had she only dreamed it was related to her and directed at her? Had she only dreamed…only hoped… Nick fell back at the slightest pressure of her hands. And she followed immediately after him. Followed, guiding herself by the scent of him and the heat of him because his clothing…his dark jeans and even darker tee-shirt…blended so perfectly into the absolute night that all she could see of him was the pale shimmer of his glasses as they caught some errant and escaped beam of faroff light. “You’d be much more attractive without those horrible things,” she murmured, purring the 84
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words silkily as her body followed him and found him, leaping onto the bench atop him so that she knelt with her legs spread and her most private flesh bared and ready atop his muscular if trembling thighs. “W…without wh…what?” His voice seemed disembodied. Not a part of anything real, or anything entirely of this world. His voice seemed like an invitation. Leaning forward, lifting the hem of her shirt so she could feel the brushing of his aroused and reaching shaft against the supersensitized skin of her mid-section, Shalom reached for her breasts, bare beneath their thin and hardly protective covering of cotton. She reached to stroke gently, to feel the sudden rivers of sensation that poured from the spot where twin gold rings, placed there no more than six months ago, stood firmly embedded, deliciously embedded, in the points of her nipples. Nipple rings. Stroking lightly and purposefully, remembering the strange whim that had led her to rebelliously spend the money her prudish and unimaginative mother had sent her for Christmas on such a strange and never before thought of thing, Shalom leaned forward even more to place another kiss to Nick’s mouth. Another simmering and shimmering kiss, exactly like the very first one he’d given her, so 85
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impulsively and so without warning, the day before in the Smithfield Garage. She kissed him, and then she remembered. It wasn’t a welcome memory under the circumstances or even, she thought, a very appropriate one. But it was persistent. It wouldn’t go away. So she had no choice but to face it, no choice but to open herself up to it and allow it entry. She’d forgotten about the kiss. The other one. Yesterday. In the garage. Kissing was on Carly’s infernal list. She felt sure it was. And she’d forgotten to claim her point for it. In all the excitement and, admit it, Shal, the shock of her bizarre conversation with a best friend who’d turned out to be nothing short of a raving sex maniac, she’d forgotten all about the kiss and forgotten all about the point she thought she deserved for the kiss. Fastening her mouth over his, plunging deeper than before, deeper than ever with her tongue, she remembered that she’d forgotten and vowed she wouldn’t forget again. Kissing was on the list. She remembered that much about it. Just like she remembered there hadn’t been a single word…not one, God-blessed one…about the points depending upon whether the kiss had been a good one or a bad one. It simply said kissing wasn’t cheating. And she was 86
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going to get her money’s worth. Was going to get everything she deserved, everything she sought. Nick groaned softly as she covered his mouth and sank herself into the depths of it. But it wasn’t a groan of protest. It was a groan, accompanied by a rigid and thrusting jerking of his shaft at her abdomen, of invitation. Of an invitation she accepted immediately. With no questions asked. Laughing softly in her sudden victory, laughing very softly because this challenge of Carly’s was turning out to be one hell of a lot more fun than any of Carly’s challenges had ever been fun before, Shalom straightened her legs a little to lift herself away from him. And felt an immediate rush of soft and pleasured gratification when he groaned a long, drawn-out groan of sheer agony. She’d kissed him and she’d earned her point. Now it was time to move on to bigger things. Lifting herself, a little awkwardly because the slats of the park bench were rough between her knees and the shape of them uneven and undulating, she thought it was time to move on to better things. Things that would win even Carly’s respect and undying admiration. She hadn’t read the list. Not beyond the first few words and maybe a brief glimpse that had caught a few of the enumerated items. She didn’t know for sure what was on it and what wasn’t. But whatever kind of sex she was about to inflict 87
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upon Nick O’Hara, she guessed it must sure as hell be on that list. Because she was going to take him. Deliberately, in an act that couldn’t quite be termed date-rape…couldn’t at all be termed daterape, since Nick was lying beneath her now, making no protest when he had to know, had to have guessed… But it had to be on the list, she thought as she adjusted her position a little, flying blind, and folded her legs to lower herself to the spot where she thought he’d be. The spot where she thought he stood waiting, no doubt eager and ready for exactly what he was about to get. This had to count, because she was doing it without feeling. She was taking this man and making him hers with no strings attached. No emotional strings, just as Carly had insisted. No strings of any kind. As if guided by magic, her flesh found the tip of him and brushed against it. She heard a soft hissing, as of breath being dragged between clenched teeth, and felt a murmur of a touch as his hands groped for her hips, brushing past them but missing them almost entirely in the eye-searing darkness. She was going to use him now. Just the way Carly had said men were meant to be used. Halting her descent at just the perfect height to stroke her folds of undeniably awakened and undeniably interested femininity across the most extreme tip of him, she was going to take him and use him, 88
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and then she was going to walk away from him. Carly had been so right about that. It was much better…much safer…to keep this at a purely clinical level. To make it be about the act of screwing and nothing else. To keep the possibility of…what had Carly called it? ‘Messy emotional attachments’? Yes. To keep the possibility of messy emotional attachments out of this. So, lowering herself a little more, pressing herself a little more tightly down onto the rigidity that became in that moment like a heat-seeking missile with the most sophisticated and deadly accurate guidance system ever devised by man, Shalom made a promise to herself. She was going to use him tonight. She was going to earn her points…all kinds of points, if she had anything to say about it. And then she was going to walk away from him. Was going to cast him aside. Put him out of her mind. Never think about him, never think about a single, blessed thing she’d done with him or to him, again. He was a vehicle, she told herself, beginning to sway her hips back and forth in a way that elicited a grunt of harsh approval from the man…the vehicle…she could no longer see. He was a means to an end. And she meant to attain that end. She meant, for the first time in her entire life, to 89
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beat Carly at one of her own silly and reckless games. “Shit,” Nick murmured, his hands finding her hips at last and fastening there…tightening there. “Shalom…” Lifting her hands away from him, Shalom slid them up again, beneath the wilted fabric of her cotton shirt. She slid them up, all the way to her breasts and then, cupping them in palms made sweaty by the heat of the night and by nothing else, she slid her thumbs across the sharply raised points of her nipples and the pair of tiny gold rings embedded neatly through the buds that remained permanently aroused and permanently sensitized as a result. She stroked her nipples softly, tugging gently and repeatedly at her piercings, and felt the sizzling shimmer of it…the bursting tide of warmth…radiate down and into the tremulous flesh that played so determinedly with the tip of Nick’s shaft. “Shalom!” His hands tightened again. They tightened to almost painful tightness as he tried to hold her back. “Wait. We can’t just…” So. He didn’t want this. Maybe that was another point. Maybe that was another ten points. Delighted with herself, delighted with her creative thinking and her ability to remain analytical and detached even with those hot shimmers hardening already-hard nipples and 90
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tightening already-tight and thrumming muscles in her abdomen and elsewhere, Shalom lowered herself. Onto him. Her thumbs traced ever tighter, ever more brisk and ever more unbelievably enticing circles across the straining points of her breasts as she lowered her body very slowly, feeling each and every degree of intimate parting as her flesh claimed his and took his. “My God, what are you…” Nick cried out, the exclamation dying on a sharp intake of breath as she increased her speed at the halfway point, ramming herself down and onto him with a brutality and a force that made the slats of the old park bench groan a little and creak in apprehensive outrage. “What do you think I’m doing?” Eyes closed, head thrown back, her hands still diligently pleasured nipples that couldn’t possibly grow any more taut or any more hard, not even when she plucked at the rings embedded in them and pulled deliberately. Pulled with more force and more deliberation than she had ever, in all the time she’d secretly worn them and secretly wondered why she wore them, pulled. Catching the tiny bits of gold between her thumbs and forefingers, she tugged sharply. And cried out herself when a sudden explosion of sensation that wasn’t pain, couldn’t be pain 91
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because it was in some inexplicable way absolute and perfect pleasure, rippled through every fiber of her. “I think we sh…shouldn’t…” Propelled by the stroking and tugging and the currents of electricity it generated, Shalom’s hips moved more briskly. Her entire body moved more briskly, losing its languorous and lazy carelessness. They’d told her piercing her nipples would have effects like none she’d ever imagined. They’d told her, and she hadn’t really believed. She hadn’t believed anything except that piercing them was just a secret way, an intentional way, of getting back at a world that had deemed her boring and a mother who had made her inhibited and… Well, she certainly wasn’t inhibited now! Plucking at her shining gold rings, delectable gold rings she suddenly cherished and treasured as she’d never in her life cherished or treasured anything else, she was about as far from uninhibited as even Carly had ever thought of being. “We shouldn’t be what?” she asked dreamily, so lost in the cloud of sensation she’d created…sensation that began and seemed, ultimately, to end in the flesh that held those inconsequential and yet earth-moving circlets of metal imbedded in their depths…that she barely 92
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heard herself. This really was sensational. Really was… Her hips moved harder. They moved first from side to side and then back and forth, swaying, rocking, lifting. Only to plummet again. Lifting only to re-claim the hard and seeking ridge of flesh that had been meant to be in complete and utter control…that had been meant, if her mother was to be believed, to punish her for the simple act of being born female. Lifting, she dropped. Dropping, she rocked. Rocking, she alternately massaged nipples that grew increasingly outraged as well as increasingly, insatiably, aroused by the persistent tugging and manipulating of what she’d had deliberately implanted there, as if in anticipation for this very, this completely unexpected and completely unexpectable moment. It was strange. In some ways…in almost every way…the delight she felt as she manipulated her tiny and never-before-manipulated gold rings overshadowed the other delight. The one that pressed itself so tightly and so diligently into the flesh between her legs. Maybe it was because she really had made up her mind to view the man beneath her as nothing more than the subject of an admittedly unique experiment and a way to get the victory she craved in an equally unique and unprecedented 93
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kind of challenge. Or maybe the woman who’d done her piercings had been right. Maybe the selfinflicted torture of her own manipulations really was the most powerfully sensual thing she would ever experience. But at the same time, along with all the crescendos of sound and fury that no longer came entirely from outside her head and the seething waves of pure and unadulterated passion that did have their origins completely and exclusively inside herself, she felt another sensation. A very strange one. Of…disappointment? She felt an odd, deep-down and frustrated keening of… “Shalom!” Nick’s shaky, hoarsely urgent exclamation broke through her daydream. “What?” Abandoning her nipple rings, abandoning her nipples and then her breasts entirely, she nevertheless kept moving atop him. Kept moving in the way that, now that she’d cleared her head a little and snapped out of her self-induced reverie, told her was having the desired effect. The way that was driving him steadily and inexorably, perilously close to the point of no return. If she hadn’t driven him there already. “We have to stop,” he said, sounding sick and uncertain. “We have to…” “I thought this was what you wanted.” Increasing the motions of her hips, ensuring that the pressure she exerted upon him and the 94
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reciprocating pressure he exerted into her was never the same, never constant from one instant into the next, she lowered her voice to a purr that almost became a snarl of unbridled animal need. “I thought this was what all men wanted?” “It is.” He gasped again, and Shalom thought she could feel him holding back, feel him struggling to deny what he was on the very verge of being absolutely unable to deny. “But we can’t…it shouldn’t be like this. Shouldn’t…isn’t…” She had him. She could do what she wanted with him. Could earn all the points it was possible to earn from him. He was beneath her, was trapped beneath thighs she’d locked around him with more strength than she’d dreamed she possessed, and he belonged to her. So, why did she hesitate? Why did she pause for just the slightest of moments, still so far from her own climax and her own satisfaction that it seemed impossible she would ever reach them? Why did she let him regain control right at the instant she realized she needed that climax because she’d never in her life truly had a climax? Why did she relax her grip upon his thighs, relax too her more internal grip upon the shaft that was her one method of attaining that climax, 95
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enough to give him the opportunity he so obviously sought? She didn’t know why, but she did relax. And then it was all over. In less than a second. Nick growled. Not so much with victory or jubilation as with relief from the worst anxiety imaginable. His hands tightened on her hips. His arms tightened too, and in a single thrust fueled by a strength she had no chance of overcoming even if she’d been prepared to try to overcome it, he shoved her away. He lifted her off him just as the heated rush of his seed began to spill from him. “That was close,” he whispered as his body convulsed uselessly scant inches below the straining and unsatisfied flesh of hers. “That was way too close, Shalom.” “I don’t…” Without warning, tears filled her eyes. She blinked them back, determined not to shed them, not to shed a single one of them because that would mean she’d made the emotional attachment she’d been so determined to avoid. She blinked them back, but she couldn’t stop them from forming again and again as she whispered “Nick, I don’t understand,” in the most heartbroken voice she’d ever heard.
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CHAPTER SEVEN
“S
o, out with it.” Carly’s tone, bright and chirpy in Shalom’s ear, did nothing at all to lighten Shalom’s mood. If anything, it only made her more gloomy. Only made her feel her losses that much more clearly and that much more poignantly. The loss of her own orgasm, defeated by Nick’s sudden wresting of control and his sudden denial of a wish she hadn’t until the very moment of denial even realized she harbored. “Tell me everything,” Carly went on insistently. “Tell me what happened last night.” “I went first the last time,” Shalom hedged, not certain she could tell anything at all, much less everything. “It’s your turn.” “O…kay.” Carly sounded on the alert now. She sounded like her radar, infallible at its best and nothing short of diabolical at times like this, had just snapped to highest possible alert. “Who was your victim this time?” Shalom 97
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inquired, working hard to put just the right amount of levity tinged with friendly sarcasm into her tone. “You remember Eddie.” “Eddie?” All Shalom’s troubles dissipated instantly in the time it took her to shriek the one name she’d thought she’d never in her life have occasion to shriek. “My God, Carly, tell me you didn’t?” “Of course I did.” Carly sounded as smug as ever. And one hell of a lot less wounded than encounters with the despicable Eddie Stevens had used to make her sound. “That would be a Number Eight, Shal. Sex with the ex. A treat that shouldn’t be missed in this life.” “Oh, Carly. I’m…speechless.” Carly laughed, but Shalom thought she did sound a little shaky. “It wasn’t so bad, really. Not like when we were married and the drunken buffalo thought he had a right to rut at me whenever he wanted…a dozen times a day, if that was what he wanted.” “I don’t know how you could. After what he put you through…I didn’t even know you were still in touch with him, Carly.” “I’m not.” The shakiness vanished as quickly as Shalom thought it had appeared, and if anything Carly only sounded more cheerful than ever. More indefatigably chipper. “Then how…” 98
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“I just sort of dropped by his favorite watering hole. I poured myself a few stiff ones, put on the lowest-cut halter top I’ve got…” “The red one?” Carly’s answering chuckle was low. Almost lascivious. “The red one,” she agreed. “And I went down there. Because I knew he’d be hanging on his favorite bar stool, drunk as ten skunks. I went right up to him and I proceeded to rub my halfnaked tits all over him. He could never resist tits, you know. Half-naked or otherwise. Then I grabbed his disgusting little worm and just said ‘hello’ to him.” Shalom fought not to laugh. But it was no use. The picture was too perfect, the image too persistent and too, honestly, outrageous. “I wish I could have seen the look on his face.” “It was one for the books, let me tell you.” “So you got a Number Eight this time. Is that all?” “Well, we were both intoxicated. Eddie was stinkin’, as usual. And I had to be half-stinkin’ at least, to even think about letting the little hairball stick his diddly little wiener into me. So that would be another Number…” “That would be a ‘do-over’, Carly. That’s what that would be.” “Do-overs are allowed. Where’s the fun in any of it if you can’t have a do-over every once in a while?” 99
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“Fine.” Shalom laughed again. “Then I’m claiming a do-over right now. Because I kissed Nick both times. I kissed his delicious face hard, and I know that was on the list. I know…” “Do you want to hear the rest of it before we delve into your wretchedly unimaginative sexual appetites, Shal, or don’t you?” “You started it,” Shalom pointed out with another laugh. “So don’t call me wretched. But okay. Go ahead. I just hope my stomach can take it.” “There isn’t any more,” Carly admitted. “Nothing except that I was drunk and he was drunk and, as usual where Eddie is concerned, the whole thing was so lame and so completely unsatisfying it wasn’t even worth the cost of the Johnny Walker Red it took to get my nerve up for it in the first place.” “I could have told you that, Carly.” “So I’ll claim a Number Six for the lame. And a Number Fourteen for the do-over being drunk as a skunk and a Number Nineteen for Eddie once again completely failing to satisfy the female in his little wrestling match.” “Four points.” Shalom’s laughter was coming easier now. One hell of a lot easier. “That’s just pitiful, Carly.” “Oh, really. And I suppose you’re going to tell me you did better?” “I should hope to hell I can do better than a 100
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measly four points. When I’ve already automatically got one for my do-over.” “Then let’s hear it. Let’s hear all about all these spectacular and wonderful points.” “Okay. Since do-overs are allowed, I claim one for kissing Nick yesterday.” “Okay. Kissing is allowed. Kissing is Number Twelve, and it certainly is sex that doesn’t count.” “So that’s two,” Shalom purred, enjoying herself way more than she’d ever intended to allow herself to enjoy herself. “And I have another do-over. For the sex in a public place.” “Number Sixteen.” Carly sounded approving. Very, very approving. “Do tell, Shal. I’m all ears.” “It was a very public place,” Shalom replied, unable now that she’d started to avoid a stabbing burst of impending victory when it speared her right through the heart. “With a very large crowd of potential witnesses.” “Only potential?” Carly sounded interested now. Really, really interested. “You didn’t let any of them see?” “I’m not you, Carly.” “Okay.” Once again she didn’t sound at all upset, didn’t sound at all perturbed or outraged at what could easily have been taken for…what in its own way was…an insult. “Where would this very public place be?” “Point State Park.” “That’s not so spectacular, Shal. Heck, I must 101
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have done it a dozen times in the park, and so has just about everyone besides you that I’ve ever…” “In the middle of the symphony concert.” “Oooooh, God. Okay. I’ll give you that one, for a grand total of two.” “Three,” Shalom corrected. “With yesterday’s do-over. But wait, Carly. There’s more.” Carly’s chuckle was low. Evil. Knowing. “I’ll just bet there is. You’re like a tiger unleashed, girl.” “Well, we started out by handling each other.” “Handling?” Shalom heard silence at the other end of the phone line for a long moment. “You mean like in…” “You know.” “Masturbating?” “Um-hmmmm.” Shalom was glad Carly couldn’t see the sudden hot flaming of her cheeks at just the sound of that word. Because that would be something Carly would never, ever let her live down. “Dooo-Jesus. The list says it’s masturbating yourselves while you watch each other. But I’ve got to give you that one, Shal. That’s even better than anything that’s on the list. We’ll call that one a Number Shalom. Now, anything else?” “I’ve barely gotten started.” “I’m impressed. And proud of you. So what comes next? You beat each other’s meat, and then what? Did you do the deed? Did you finally get 102
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him inside you, or did you chicken out again?” “I did not chicken out, Carly! I never chickened out.” “Whatever.” “I just wasn’t…ready…the first time. That’s all.” “So? What about this time? Were you ready this time?” Shalom sighed. She slid down the wall against which she’d been leaning, slid all the way down until she sat on her heels leaning against it, curled into a tight and oddly defensive little ball. “I was ready.” “And you did it.” “Sort of.” “Shal, how the hell could it be ‘sort of’? Either you got his tool inside you or you didn’t.” “If you’re going to be crude…” “So, which was it? Did he or didn’t he?” Shalom sighed, remembering the disappointment and the hollowness she’d felt for hours upon hours… the disappointment and hollowness she still felt, even almost twenty-four hours after the fact. “He did. Sort of.” “There we go again with that…” “He did the strangest thing, Carly. He…I don’t even know what to call it. We were fondling each other. Having a wonderful time doing it. Then I pushed him back onto a park bench and climbed 103
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on top of him.” “You did all the work?” Carly sounded excited. “’Cause that would be a Number Twenty-two, and you deserve every bit of credit for it.” “I did all the work,” Shalom confirmed. “And then some. For a while it looked like he was enjoying himself, and I certainly was, when I was…can I ask you something, Carly? Something that has to remain confidential?” “Of course. What?” “Do pierced nipples count anywhere on that little list of yours?” “Pierced nipples? Your Nick has pierced nipples?” “He’s not my Nick. And no. He doesn’t. Have pierced nipples, I mean.” “You?” Carly shrieked. “Shal, how the hell…when the hell…” “Six months ago. I’ll tell you all about it some other time. But for right now, just tell me if it’s on the list and if I get any points for it.” “Hell yes, you get points! Even if it isn’t on the list. Because I never in my life thought you were the type to…shall I tell you about my piercing, Shal?” “I don’t want to hear it.” And Shalom didn’t. Not now and probably, she believed with all her heart and all her powers of belief in anything, not ever. “To get back to my story, everything was going along so well. I was sitting on top of him, 104
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doing all the work, doing it to him and playing with my nipple rings the whole time…” “Who’d have ever thought?” “I was building and he was building, and then just when it seemed like things were going to turn out fine, just when it seemed like he was going to finish the deed and everybody was going to walk away happy…Carly, he just all of a sudden shoved me away. He just grabbed me and shoved, and that was the end of it. That was the end of everything.” “Did he come?” “As he was shoving me away.” “Then, my dear, what you have achieved is a Number Twenty. Also known as the ‘pull and pray’ method of birth control. Which is not anything I expected, but which will definitely get you a point. And one hell of a lot of sympathy from me. So, he pulled out on you. What about you, Shal?” Shalom shook her head at the empty house that loomed dusty and desolate and just a bit more drab than she’d ever remembered it being around her. “What about me?” “Did you orgasm?” “Carly!” “It’s a legitimate question, deserving a legitimate answer.” “I just think that’s kind of person…” “Anything’s legitimate when there might be 105
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points involved.” Shalom sighed. Heavily. “All right. No, I didn’t have an orgasm. I thought I was going to, felt like I was going to, and was getting all spooled up for it. But then he did that strange pulling out thing and unnerved me so badly that I never…” “Number Nineteen for you too, then,” Carly murmured. “And a whole lot more sympathy from me. Sounds like you had a miserable time.” “Well, not completely. Not until…” “Are you going to see this Nick person again? Even if there is obviously something very wrong with him and even if I really think you ought to head out for greener grass and better pickin’s?” “That’s the thing, Carly. He just dropped me off at the door last night.” “In his cream-colored Jaguar.” “In his cream-colored Jaguar.” “I wish I could give you another do-over for that, Shal. But unless you had sex in it again…” “No sex.” Shalom’s gloom had returned fullforce. Had returned more than full-force, a darker and rainier, more suffocating cloud than the real clouds that blotted the sky outside her windows and turned the day as dark and foreboding as the inside of her heart. “We didn’t touch, hardly even touched, as he brought me home. We just sat there like two lumps, ignoring each other. He drove me right to my door but then didn’t even offer to walk me inside. Didn’t even offer to open the car door 106
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for me. He just…” “Did he say he was going to call again?” Shalom closed her eyes and leaned her suddenly throbbing head back against the wall. “He didn’t say anything,” she murmured, fighting off a fresh wave of the tears she’d been fighting ever since she’d shut the front door behind herself and turned to look through the window just in time to see him drive away into the night without so much as a backward glance. “He just let me get out of the car and then he drove off into the sunset. Into the night. And now I don’t know where I stand. I don’t have a clue where I…” “Number Three,” Carly said with complete and unwavering confidence. “What?” “Number Three. That’s where you stand. Failure to call back to ask for more.” Shalom sighed. “Carly, it was the strangest thing. It was like he was afraid of me or something. Like…I don’t know what it was like. Except that it wasn’t like any reaction I’ve ever seen in a man before.” “I wouldn’t worry too much,” Carly advised, sounding not the least bit worried at all. “You probably just wounded his masculine pride and his sense of macho when you took charge. Men are like that. So what’s next?” “What do you mean what’s next?” “Just what I said. What’s next? Where are you 107
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going to go from here?” “Go? Carly, there’s no place to go. I took your challenge and I failed. Nick’s not going to call back. It’s over, and I concede victory to you.” “There are plenty of other fish in the ocean, Shal.” “You mean…” “Just pick yourself up and get back out there. Find yourself another man…hopefully one who’s a little less of a male chauvinist pig and a little more into new and different experiences. And get on with it. There are still points to be won, girl. Still worlds to be conquered, and…” “I’ve been thinking, Carly. We should have put a time limit on this. We should have…” “Sure. Next Thursday. We continue to rack up points until next Thursday. And then the winner takes possession of the always glittering and evercoveted snowflake necklace.” “Thursday?” Shalom shook her head again. “What’s Thursday?” “The day we started. One week from the day we started.” “I just don’t think my heart’s in it, Carly.” “You’re the one with the nipple rings.” “What the hell has that got to do with any of it?” Carly snorted. “For God’s sake, girl. Even I don’t have nipple rings. Even I never thought of…ewwwww! That’s all I can say. Just 108
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ewwwww. And maybe ouch. You have all my respect. All new respect. So don’t let me down now. Any girl who’s walking around with nipple rings…say, how many nipple rings, anyway?” “Two.” “One in each?” “Uh-huh.” “Damn!” Carly really did sound impressed. “Well, then, let me just say this and then I’ll drop the whole subject. Any girl who wracked up an amazing nine points in a single night…count ‘em, Shal, there are nine of them…and who’s walking around at this very minute with rings through her nipples is not going to up and quit. Not just like that. And certain as hell not on my watch. Any girl who is walking around with nipple rings is going to pick herself up and shake the dust of that turd Nick right off her heels…” “He’s not a turd, Carly.” “You sound like you’re developing one of those messy emotional attachments I warned you about.” “It’s not an attachment at all. It’s just…” “Messy, messy, messy,” Carly clucked with a sad, not completely sympathetic chuckle, then hung up her end of the phone.
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CHAPTER EIGHT
H
e didn’t know why the sight of her surprised him so much. After all, this was where they’d met in the first place. This was the parking garage he’d used almost every day for the past six years or so, and since she’d said things to lead him to believe it was her regular parking place too, it shouldn’t be surprising they’d run into each other every now and then. The only real surprise was that they hadn’t encountered each other before. Or, as seemed much, much more likely, that they had crossed paths and he’d simply failed to notice her. But there she was now. Walking along the ramp toward her candyapple red Mustang, a plastic drugstore bag in one hand and her lime-green lunch pouch in the other, her blue-trimmed pink skirt flitting and floating around her knees with every step she took. Nick almost stopped. He almost slid his rented 110
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Jaguar into a parking place where he could hide until she exited the garage ahead of him. God, he felt like such a creep. He’d taken her out on Friday, the Fourth. He’d taken her to that symphony concert and fireworks display neither of them had bothered to enjoy. He’d done things to her and with her in their two brief patches of time together that he hadn’t done even with ladies he’d dated for months. He knew he’d gotten her hopes up. Knew he’d given her plenty of reasons to look forward to his next call and to expect it. And then how had he behaved? Clutching the Jag’s burly-maple steering wheel between sweaty-palmed hands, Nick shook his head. He slowed down but didn’t stop. Didn’t use any of the available parking places, but simply slid past them, gaining on her with every second of indecision. He’d dumped her at her door late Friday night like some kind of high school jerk. That was how he’d acted. And then he’d ignored her for an entire weekend. An entire wasted weekend, a gray Saturday and rainy Sunday neither of them was ever going to get back. And he’d meant to keep ignoring her. Meant to stay as far the hell away from her as he could. Because the idea had sprouted in his brain and lodged there that Shalom Wilson was up to something. He knew it just about as surely and 111
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unquestionably as he knew his own name or the elements on the Periodic Table. He knew. So he’d decided to go his separate way and let her go hers. He’d decided to let her find some other poor slob to play her games with and make a fool of. Except that there she was and here he was, no more than two car lengths behind her. And there was something about her. Something irresistible and too compelling to be dismissed easily. Maybe it was her hair. Shoulder length or a little longer. Even brighter than he’d remembered, brighter than the freshest new copper penny, red with blazing highlights when beams of sunlight stroked across it as she passed through them, redder even than the most gloriously red, most scintillating and sensuously red poppy had ever thought of being red. Fascinating and enthralling hair that had never come from the inside of a bottle the way most of the women he knew achieved their hair color. Or maybe it was her legs. Long and powerful beneath her zig-zaggy trimmed skirt. Nick blushed a little at the memory of how long and how powerful those legs really were…of the way he’d touched them and fondled them in the process of… As if she’d read his thoughts, or maybe simply because she’d heard the approaching low snarl of his engine as he crept inexorably up behind her, 112
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Shalom turned. She saw the car and she frowned. Then she lifted her eyes to the windshield and frowned again. Frowned even more, seeming to look straight at him even though he knew the glare of overhead lights and those same beams of feeble sunlight glittering on polished glass and gleaming metal most likely kept her from seeing much of anything at all. Her frown was thunderous. More than thunderous, it was an instantly dark and completely unforgiving scowl. And he guessed she had every right to look that way, every right to feel that way. Because he had behaved like a jerk. And she deserved an apology. Spinning around abruptly on one foot, Shalom turned her back on him and sprinted…literally sprinted, her drugstore bag and lunch pouch bouncing madly against her legs…for her Mustang. “Wait! Shal…” Damn it, his window was up. By the time he found the switch and waited for the damned, powered thing to slide partway down, she’d already unlocked her car and thrown her things inside. She’d already put one foot inside and started to leap in after it. “Shalom!” Nick pulled the Jaguar up directly behind her. So she’d have no place to go except 113
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maybe out the side of the garage and straight down, three stories to Smithfield Street below. He didn’t think the Mustang had the kind of power needed to break through heavy concrete walls. From the carefully tended look of the car, he didn’t think Shalom had the kind of desire to break through the wall even if the car could. But if the look on her face was any indication, she might just try. Might just do anything. “We need to talk, Shalom.” At least that stopped her. At least that had her pulling her leg back out of her car and stamping it down a little too hard on the floor. At least that had her turning, her face still screwed up into its murderous scowl, to glare at him. “What the hell is there to talk about?” she demanded. “I’m sorry.” It was all he could think to say and for a minute, seeing the way her expression lightened the slightest bit toward something resembling relief and potential forgiveness, he thought it was going to be enough. Then the scowl returned. And it was twice as dark. Twice as glowering and way more than twice as killing. Jesus, he’d blown it. If he knew what was good for him, he’d remember she’d been playing some kind of nefarious game with him and he’d drive away 114
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from her right now. Before the festivities and hoopla could start up again. If. But he didn’t. Because there was something about her. “I just wanted to know if we could start over again,” he said, not quite asking but not exactly stating, either. Lifting his arm to the top of the door, he rested it there and made a little sweeping motion with his hand, indicating her car and the cars all around it. “This seems like a good place to start over. Since it’s where we started the first time. You know.” “What the hell makes you think you deserve a chance to start over?” Shalom hadn’t moved. Not a muscle. She hadn’t taken a step, either. Not toward her own car and certain as hell not toward his. “Maybe I don’t.” He had to stop, had to clear his throat when a sudden and inexplicable lump rose to clot his voice and frost his words. “Maybe you’re right, and I…” The thundercloud of anger on her face cleared again. Just a little, just like before. Only this time it was lightened by an encroaching look of victories about to be won. “I just…I’m sorry, Shalom. I don’t know what else to say.” “I thought you were going to call.” “I had a lot on my mind after Friday. I…” 115
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This time she did take a step closer. It was an angry step, a potentially threatening one, but a step all the same. And more than she’d given him in all of the five minutes since he’d swung the Jag around the turn at the top of the ramp and seen her strolling purposefully, her head up and her shoulders a little too high and tight, toward her car. “You said you would call.” Had he? Nick blinked hard, blinked several times, trying to remember. He honestly couldn’t. But if he had said it, then his behavior had been doubly reprehensible, doubly… “It’s only been two days,” he said, hardly able to believe the excuse was coming out of his own mouth. Hardly able to believe, either, that he’d made it sound like he actually believed it was an acceptable excuse. Miraculously, though, it seemed to work. “Three days,” she corrected, most of the anger slipping away from her expression. “If you count today.” “Today’s not over yet.” She shook her head. Nodded. Started to say something, but was cut off by a sudden blare of horn from the Caddy that had crept up behind him while he’d been sitting here in the middle of the ramp, hogging up all the space other drivers would of course want to use. 116
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Screw the Caddy. People were in too damned much of a hurry these days anyway, what with their damned cell phones and their damned appointments, and… “I was hoping we could at least talk,” he said, beckoning a little with his head, inviting her to come around the front of the car and climb in next to him. Or better yet… The Caddy blared again, and he touched the gas. He saw Shalom’s look of sudden, intense disappointment only fleetingly as he drove past her and then, on a final and especially rude blare of the Caddy’s horn, slid the Jag into the next available parking slot. The Caddy’s driver flipped him off as she zoomed past. And it was all Nick could do to not return the favor. It was all he could do to not fling out a few rude words of his own about her temperament and her driving abilities, especially when he saw the headset stuck in her ear and realized she had been talking on a cell phone and was indeed one of those people he detested for their constant hurry, hurry and refusal to just slow down and enjoy life once in a goddamned while. Stepping out of the Jag, he shut the door and turned to look at Shalom across the roofs of the three or four cars that separated them. Now she looked confused. But there was nothing hurried about her. She gave no sense that she had someplace 117
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better to be…someplace more important and more exciting…someplace that didn’t involve him. She was looking straight at him. Half frowning and half not, she was looking right into his eyes and she wasn’t moving. She simply stood in a timeless way that seemed all but forgotten in the rush and tumble of a modern world gone absolutely, irreparably nuts, waiting for him. Could that be what he liked so much about her? That even though she was playing some kind of strange little game with him, she at least had time for him? She at least had time to wait for him? He guessed so. “Let’s start again?” he asked, stepping into the aisle only to stop short a few feet from her, still uncertain how to proceed or if it was even wise to try to proceed at all. “How do you suggest we do that?” She wasn’t shouting any more. Her words didn’t have a bitter and unforgiving edge, and she wasn’t stamping her foot…wasn’t looking like she was about to stamp her foot in rage…any more, either. “How about that restaurant?” She didn’t say anything. But even across the little bit of dusky distance that separated them, Nick saw indecision flicker in her eyes. “We were going to go there the other day,” he said, moving a few steps closer. “The day we met. Remember?” Looking almost reluctant, Shalom nodded. 118
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“I thought you liked the idea of going there.” He moved a few more steps forward. Moved up to the point where he could almost, if he stretched his arm out perfectly straight and strained just the tiniest bit, touch her. “I thought I saw in your eyes that you’d like to go there.” “I’ve wanted to,” she agreed with a small and not quite dismissive shrug of shoulders she still held too high, as if she expected some sort of attack. “Ever since the place opened I’ve meant to. But…” I was saving it for a special occasion. Shalom didn’t actually say that, but Nick knew she thought it. Knew it as certainly as if she’d suddenly started shouting at him again, blaming him for not taking her there sooner, when… He felt his blush return when he remembered why they hadn’t gone to the restaurant the first time around…when he remembered what she’d done to him in the back seat of his rented car without the slightest bit of encouragement or, seemingly, the slightest bit of provocation. He felt his face begin to burn, saw the ghost of a smile flick for the briefest of instants across her face, and discovered he couldn’t look at her any more. “So,” he said, clearing his throat in a futile and all too transparent effort to buy himself a little time. “We’re in agreement? It’s the flowery place, then?” “Nasturtiums?” Shalom’s voice lifted on a note 119
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of barely concealed laughter as she closed the distance between them. As she reached out, her hand seeming to lift in torturously slow slowmotion to touch his arm. To burn a series of small, pinpoint holes right through the bare skin below his shirt sleeve, scorching straight on into bone and igniting an internal fire he…his dick…knew instantly was not going to be extinguished by any but the most extreme measures. Nick cleared his throat again with the same strained and uncomfortable sound. “I thought it was Nettles. Or something like that.” “Nettles are nasty, stinging, unforgiving and unpleasant things,” she said with surprising gravity considering the foolishness of his last remark. “Why on earth would anyone name a restaurant after them?” “I…” Jerking like a puppet controlled by a woefully inexperienced and untalented puppeteer, Nick lifted his arm. The one she held. Still jerking though his control began to return almost as quickly as he’d nearly lost it, he tucked her hand into the crook of his elbow and turned her away from her car, turned her away from his. Reaching out her free arm to its full length, she slammed the Mustang’s door shut. But she never missed a step. Never gave a single hint she might be about to reconsider or refuse his offer. She simply went along with him, her head ducked so that even if he had the balls to look, he 120
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wouldn’t have been able to read her expression. Wouldn’t have had a chance to try to figure out what the expression meant, or what kind of future it boded for him…them. If they had any kind of future at all. “You said you had a lot on your mind,” she murmured when they’d gone more than halfway to the stairs. “Some kind of trouble at work?” “No.” Yes! Trouble, but not at work. If he’d been pressed, in that moment Nick could scarcely have explained…scarcely have remembered…what kind of work he did, or where. Because the trouble he was in, the trouble that walked so placidly along beside him right this very minute, her face still hidden from him and her voice revealing nothing at all to him, was more trouble than he’d had to face in his life. Ever. And to make matters worse, it was trouble that only increased exponentially every time he tried to examine it. Because it was a kind of trouble he’d never prepared himself to find himself in. A kind of trouble for which he had no answers. Not even a glimmer of an answer. The scientist in Nick hated questions and problems without answers. Hated, too, questions and problems that seemed to have no answer, seemed to have no constancy, seemed to have no predictability. Problems like the one he had 121
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strolling along next to him. For a moment he almost turned and ran. But then Shalom looked up at him with enormous gray eyes. Why hadn’t he noticed the color of those eyes before? Why hadn’t he realized they were the not-gray and not-blue color of moon? The stone, not the heavenly body itself. Although, now that he considered the idea… Moon eyes. Wasn’t that a big part of what made her so irresistibly attractive to him? The color of those remarkable eyes, moon-pale near their centers and universe-dark at the outer rims? And at the same time, wasn’t that what made her such a fearful mystery, such a thing his better instincts told him should be avoided at all cost…any cost? She was complex. A mystery that really did have no discernable answer. And he, Nick O’Hara, plodding scientist who’d spent his entire life believing firmly that every question had an answer and if it didn’t it wasn’t a viable question at all, was completely at a loss to answer or explain anything at all.
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CHAPTER NINE
“H
ow the hell am I supposed to see anything, here?” Shalom almost laughed when he said it. But then she immediately felt the laughter solidify into a multi-edged and rock-hard shard of confusion in the pit of her stomach. When she looked up for the first time into Nick O’Hara’s face without the barrier of his glasses between them, she could barely breathe. Could barely remember how to breathe. So she gulped instead. And wondered if she’d ever again be able to find her breath, much less hope to sustain her own life with it. He’d been handsome before. Slightly pompously handsome in a carefully controlled and too-formal way, his emerald eyes a gleam of barely concealed sexuality and promise behind the heavy-rimmed glasses she’d just insisted…unwisely, perhaps?…he remove. Unwisely, because now that she could see them clearly, without the distraction of heavy, dark 123
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frames, his eyes shimmered more than emerald, deeper than emerald. More captivating even than she’d thought, they had a deep-forest light to them, a sort of inexplicable misty distance that no doubt stemmed from the difficulty he obviously had seeing without the help of glasses, yet which remained breathtaking just the same. Even his features, always finely chiseled and enough to turn a girl’s head and attract all the most important kinds of her attention, seemed to have changed. They seemed to have grown a little more rugged and imperfect, yet at the same time so infinitely more perfect and delightful that this time her breath really did catch in her throat. This time, looking straight at him, she knew her lips parted slightly. Her jaw too. Knew she sat across from him with an unmistakable look of rapt longing, of wonder and excitement just about to happen spread across her face for all the world…for Nick O’Hara in particular…to see. “Have you ever considered contact lenses?” she asked at length, when she was able to ask again. Muttering a little under his breath, Nick angled the menu around in search of better light. “I have them,” he admitted. “But it’s such a pain in the ass to put them in and take them out…” “That’s because you haven’t practiced.” Putting down his menu, he flashed her an embarrassed smile. “Probably. What are you going to have?” 124
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Shalom sighed. “I’m not very hungry.” “This is a hell of a time to notice that.” Quickly, she looked at him. And just as quickly looked away. He hadn’t sounded angry. Hadn’t looked it, either. He hadn’t looked anything but absolutely dark golden-haired, green-eyed gorgeous. Too gorgeous to bear. And she really wasn’t hungry. Not for anything but him. “Shalom.” Devoting herself doggedly to the menu spread out before her, she didn’t look up. Not even when Nick took her hand, covering it with one of his own. A hand that was big enough and strong enough and warm enough to send an exciting tingle of electricity into her arm and from there straight into her heart, only to lodge tight there. Only to refuse to be either budged or ignored. She didn’t look at him. Meant never, if she could possibly avoid it, to look at him again and risk having him see… “Shalom?” “The veal looks good…” “Forget about food. We can have anything or we can have nothing. It really doesn’t matter.” Finally she had to look at him. Finally, because there seemed no other graceful or polite thing she could do. And the looking was worse than she’d 125
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feared, worse than she’d remembered. Because the light filled his eyes again. That strange, sparkling emerald light that only intensified the color of them, turning them from the clearest and purest hue of the most valuable gemstone to something infinitely deeper, something that existed nowhere in nature except right there, right in the eyes that gazed back at her with longing he no longer seemed even to try to conceal. “Would you like to leave?” he asked very quietly. So quietly that for a moment she hesitated, not completely certain she’d heard what she thought she heard. Then, as if she’d answered the question, Nick raised his free hand to flag their waiter. “There’s been a change of plans,” he said, indicating the two glasses of wine on their table. “If we could have…” “Dessert,” Shalom blurted, not really wanting it but too embarrassed to simply get up and walk out of a restaurant that was already packed with an early evening crowd and running a long waiting list for tables. “I’d like the chocolate mousse, please.” Nick’s eyes crinkled a little at the corners. The look was half mystification and half understanding, all mixed up with a look of admiring amusement. “Chocolate mousse, then,” he said with the slightest…the most unnerving and titillating…of chuckles. “For two.” 126
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“I don’t know why I’m acting so strange,” Shalom said as soon as the waiter disappeared, feeling herself blush again. Feeling herself blush hotter and harder. Because, of course, she did know. Somewhere deep down at the back of her mind she knew exactly why she’d started to act strange and psychotic, even if she didn’t want to admit she knew. Even if she couldn’t face what she knew now, what she’d known all along. That she was more attracted to Nick O’Hara than she’d ever wanted to be attracted to anyone. She was way more attracted and way more in over her head. “I didn’t think you were…” “Please!” Uncertain whether to laugh aloud or give in to what she really wanted to do and just break down into tears of complete and utter frustration, Shalom held up a hand to stop Nick before he had a chance to get started. “I know I’ve been acting strange. I know I’ve acted nothing but weird and crazy. And probably a dozen other things that should set you to running this instant. But…it’s just…” Hating herself, Shalom wanted to kick herself when she heard the way her words trailed off on a yearning note into one of the most miserable silences she’d ever been forced to endure. “Just what?” Nick’s hand tightened around hers. And that was when she realized he’d been holding it all along. That was when she realized 127
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he’d never let go and that the initial electrical buzz had subsided somewhat. Into a more constant and steady though hardly less energizing current that warmed her as if from the inside out. Warmed her. Made her feel special. Really, really special…more special than she’d felt in her life. Confused, blinking rapidly at the enormous and enormously strong masculine hand atop hers, Shalom pulled hers back. She pulled it away. “You started to say something,” Nick persisted. “It was nothing.” “I hardly think it was nothing. And I’d really like to hear. Because if I’ve done anything…if I’ve said anything to…” “Just answer one question for me. If you wouldn’t mind.” His eyes sparkled again briefly, almost wickedly, before they turned absolutely and unconditionally serious. “Anything,” he murmured. “You weren’t going to call me again. Were you?” Instantly he looked shamefaced. And that was all the answer she needed. “I don’t think I’ll have that dessert after all,” she murmured even as the waiter approached their table, tray in hand, holding a pair of the most delectable, creamy and chocolate-sprinkled creations she’d ever seen. She’d never in her life passed on chocolate mousse. 128
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Especially not on chocolate mousse that looked the way that chocolate mousse looked. But she was about to pass this time. And that was scary. Strange-scary. That went so far beyond either strange or scary that she hardly knew how to classify it. Hardly knew how to react or if she should react at all. And then there was Nick. He was looking at her right now. No longer shielded by the glasses she’d urged him to remove, his eyes only seemed to be growing greener by the second. They seemed to be growing more intense and more piercing by the second. And that couldn’t be good. In her confusion, turning away from him to lurch toward the door on legs that suddenly, unaccountably felt like they were entirely different lengths, like they were parts of two entirely different and entirely unconnected bodies, Shalom nearly tipped over their table. She came within inches of tipping it, and only the combined efforts of Nick and the waiter, seen only dimly through eyes gone blurry with her confusion, kept it from toppling. “Shalom?” Nick called softly but urgently as she made her way unsteadily, on legs that really were going to give out at any moment, to the door and through it, into the early evening stillness of the street beyond. “Wait, Shalom!” 129
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She didn’t. Stumbling blindly, she turned and, not caring if the direction she’d chosen was the right one, felt her way along the buildings, trailing a hand heavily across windows and doors and walls of brick and stone and rough wood siding. She didn’t trust herself to find her own way. Didn’t trust herself not to do something foolish and potentially fatal, like wander into the path of a speeding truck or bus. Behind her, she was dimly aware of Nick, following and calling out her name repeatedly. He must have paid the waiter. Must have given him cash for the half-drunk wine and the untasted desserts, because there hadn’t been time for a credit card. But that was no longer her concern. That had never been her concern. All she wanted now was… And that was enough to stop her. Enough to leave her gasping, leaning heavily against the corner of a stone-faced building long enough for Nick to catch up to her. Long enough for him to grab her arm with another of those impossibly sizzling, improbably tingling touches. “You weren’t going to call me again.” Shalom’s chin came up, but her mouth trembled. She knew it did and wondered why in the hell that should matter so much. Wondered why in the hell Nick should matter so much, when he’d been nothing but a fortunate coincidence… nothing but a mercilessly good-looking guy who’d happened to 130
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show up in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. And nothing else. Certainly he was nothing else to her, and certainly she ought to be able to walk away from him right now. Walk away permanently and without so much as a second thought or a backward glance. Certainly. Except that she couldn’t. Nick’s fantastic eyes were so disturbing. They were the kind of eyes that had her automatically feeling hot and cold and dizzy all at the same time. They were still the kind of eyes that made her want desperately to look away, look anywhere else but straight into them, even though she knew the odds of her ever again being able to look anywhere else were about a zillion to one. Because he’d captured her. Somewhere along the line, he’d found a way to penetrate her with a look and lodge some part of himself inextricably deep inside her. And she shuddered. A little a first and then more and more violently as his gaze held hers. And held it and held it and held it. She was caught. No doubt about it. And there would be no going back now. “Wh…wh…what…” She had to stop because she knew she was about to make no sense. Had to moisten her lips several times before she thought she’d have any luck with even the simplest of words or phrases. “What happens now?” she 131
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asked, her voice no more than a faint and quavery rasp, barely audible even to herself. Nick’s emerald eyes quit flashing in their disconcerting way. They quit laughing or looking amused. Very nearly quit gleaming, too. “For the love of God,” he murmured, sounding every bit as perplexed and off-balance as she’d sounded the second before, “I don’t know.” At last she managed to tear her gaze away from his. It took a superhuman effort…more than a superhuman effort…but she did it. She lowered her gaze and swiveled her head around with another effort that seemed to cost every last bit of strength she possessed. She looked first one way along the street, then looked the other. It was deserted at the moment. The pavement was fading rapidly now, toward premature evening in the canyon between tall buildings and beneath the shadow of still taller buildings looming a block or two away. A soft, hot breeze had sprung up, flinging the ever-present bits of grit and debris ahead of it. Flinging them straight into her face and whipping her hair into her eyes so that she was forced, with an absurdly unsteady and barely controlled hand, to reach up and brush them back. Not once, but several times before she finally turned her back to the wind. “I don’t know either,” she mumbled, wondering again just what the hell had happened to change things. What the hell was happening right now to keep on changing 132
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them even after she’d warned herself that he meant nothing to her. That he was the subject of her strange experiment. Nothing else. “What?” Nick leaned down from his impressive height…a height that seemed only to have grown more impressive, impossibly impressive, in the short time they’d been standing in the middle of the sidewalk, dithering about which way to go and discussing nothing at all at considerable length. “I…nothing.” Squaring her shoulders, refusing to listen to her mind when it shrieked at her to look up at him again and even when it tried to force her chin to rise against every bit of will and determination she could summon, Shalom strode forward. Toward the parking garage where she should have stayed in the first place. Where she should have resisted this man’s insidious, dangerous charms in the first place. “It had to be something.” Nick trailed along after her. In desperation or in silent agreement. Shalom couldn’t tell which, and she guessed it didn’t really matter. Because they were headed back to the parking garage, and her fingers were already on the keys to her Mustang, tucked in their usual place in the little pocket just inside the top of her purse. Another few minutes and she’d jump into it. Another few minutes and she’d be safe, with the door locked behind her and Nick locked away 133
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from her. Another few minutes and she’d simply drive away from him and forget him, forget all about the peculiar effect he seemed to have on her every time she let him get too close. Every time she allowed him to touch her. Another few minutes, and… But he wasn’t going to let her do anything of the kind. Of course. She hadn’t taken more than a dozen steps with him right behind her the entire time, before he reached out again and laid his hand on her arm. Before she felt the old familiar and shockingly welcome tingle as he touched her arm and once again pulled her to a stop. “We have to talk,” he said very quietly. Steeling herself, no more able to resist impulse when it ordered her to look up into his eyes than she was able to resist when it ordered her to go along with one of Carly’s dubious schemes, Shalom looked up. Nick had put on his glasses. Thank God. His eyes were still impossibly green, still too compelling for safety. But he’d put on his glasses and like before, like all the other times they’d been together, that made all the difference. “What is there to talk about?” she demanded, wishing she could simply shrug off his touch and walk on. Wishing such a thing was even remotely possible. 134
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“Come on, Shalom. You can’t tell me you haven’t felt…” She quelled another shudder. Quelled it much more successfully this time. “I don’t know what the hell I feel,” Nick went on, and he did look confused. Did look bewildered. Looked even a little worried. “I just know something’s going on here and I need to get to the bottom of it. I need to…” Shalom jumped a little. Guilty conscience? She thought so. “We can’t just stand here,” she pointed out, glancing both ways along the street again. “We could go back to the car.” Which car? His? She fought off yet another shudder at the thought of the cream-colored Jaguar, so long and sleek and seductive, no doubt gleaming a softer shade tinted impossibly with blue now that shadows had dropped soft and thick in the streets. Hers? This time the shudder wouldn’t be suppressed. It was that strong. She couldn’t let him into her car. That would be like letting him into her life. Like letting him into another part of her life, one of the last few over which she seemed to have any kind of control or any kind of say about who entered and when. Letting him inside her car would be potentially 135
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fatal. Because once he’d been inside there would be no way she could ever remove him again. Not completely. There would be no way except to sell the Mustang and buy something else. Sell her brother Billy’s Mustang, and… But Billy was in Iraq. Billy had sold her the car before he left. He’d told her she needed good, reliable transportation and he’d swear by the Mustang he’d re-built piece by piece from the ground up. Billy had told her to take good care of the car, as if it was still his. And if she had to sell it, had to pull it out from under the both of them, she would lose Billy forever. He would never come back from that terrible war. He would die over there, and she would… Yanking her thoughts back quickly, almost violently, from a place where they’d settled too often and too heavily in the five months since Billy had gone, Shalom shook her head. “Then I guess this has to be it,” Nick murmured, and she saw an all too real look of regret, an all too real look of the same kind of loss she’d felt when Billy had been removed from her life, flash across his face. “Because you’re right. We can’t just stand here in the middle of the street like a couple of lumps. We can’t just keep on hemming and hawing and going nowhere. We can’t just keep discussing how we’re going to 136
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discuss things. So…” What? Even if she had an idea where Nick was leading…and Shalom thought she did, thought she had a damned good idea…she wasn’t ready to go there. Wasn’t ready to face what had suddenly, in a flash of hot and unforgiving, grit-laden wind around her ankles and the jerking of a heart about to give up at last, become unthinkable. “There has to be someplace else,” she murmured, reaching out now to capture his hand beneath hers and press it even harder, press it with scorching and unrelenting intensity against her arm. “There has to be someplace neutral, doesn’t there?” “We could always go back to the restaurant.” His gaze flicked in that direction. “No!” It has to be someplace private. Shalom didn’t think she needed to tell him that. She thought she saw the understanding of it already shimmering in eyes that once again begun to deepen in color. Eyes that once again began to exert the old and irresistible fascination upon her. And that was when she kissed him.
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CHAPTER TEN
I
t had started naturally, if completely unintentionally. Stooping over the lock to his Grandview apartment, Nick fumbled with his keys in a way he’d never in his life fumbled with anything before. His hand shook so violently he wondered if he was going to be able to fit the goddamned thing into the slot. He wondered if he was going to have to tumble to the floor right here with Shalom in his arms…right here in the hallway between his door and Mrs. Kosky’s. And wouldn’t that give the old gossip something to wag her tongue about to all the neighbors? Nick could almost hear her now. Almost anticipate every last, ever-loving word the old girl would utter. I seen him. I seen them. Lyin’ right there on the floor at my doorstep, bangin’ and screwin’ and screwin’ and bangin’. It was the most disgustin’ thing, I tell you. The most disrespectful. And let me tell you somethin’ 138
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else. Our fine Mr. Nick O’Hara, ladies man, has a tattoo of a skull and crossbones right smack-dab in the middle of his… Fortunately, the key slipped into the lock right then. Fortunately it turned, and the door swung open. Fortunately, because Nick was just about to reconsider. Just about to decide it had been a bad idea, a really stupid one, to bring Shalom here. In his efforts to avoid the apartment-house rumor mill and stay clear of all the scandals and whisperings that popped up whenever the mill started to churn, Nick had never brought his lady friends here before. Not even the few times he’d thought he was getting serious, thought he might have at last found the right one, the one he’d needed and wanted for as long as he could remember to fill up the empty places in his life and give him a sense of finally, against all odds and all probability, belonging. Never before. But, then, this was Shalom. And there’d never before been one like her. Never before been a time when the fact that his apartment on Mount Washington was so spectacularly much closer to downtown than hers in Carnegie had mattered so much. Never a time when he’d allowed a thing like location to matter so much that he’d been willing to cast all caution and good judgment to the wind and bring the lady here. 139
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Shalom was standing in his living room right now. She was standing on the little tiled pad the rental agent had so optimistically dubbed a ‘foyer’ when she’d been trying to sell the place to him. She was looking around, taking it all in…the bland beige carpet the agent had assured him would ‘go with everything’, the dark leather sofa that had seen better days but which he had a hell of a time getting rid of because it was so damned comfortable, the stereo system along one wall, and the other wall with its sweeping panorama of the city just sparkling to a million pinpoints of light now that the sun had begun to set in earnest. “Nice!” Shalom exclaimed, and Nick knew she’d been referring to the view that cost him more than he could afford and not to his sparse and somewhat pathetic furnishings. “I like it.” Which was one hell of a dumb thing to say, now, wasn’t it? Because if he didn’t like it, then why the hell would he be paying through the nose for it? God, he wondered what was happening to him. He wondered what kind of effect Shalom had upon him. Wondered why he couldn’t seem to shake free of it or break free of it no matter how the hell hard he tried to shake and break. Then she turned away from the window wall. At some point she’d crossed the room without his being aware of it. At some point she’d put him between her and the door, in some kind of 140
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unspoken but tacit admission that he now had her where he wanted her and could do what he wanted with her. That he had her where she wanted her, and she wasn’t going to resist anything he might have in mind. Christ in heaven. He’d never been that imaginative. He was a scientist, for God’s sake. A dull, dull, duller than dishwater observer and recorder and verifier of facts nobody really wanted to know, nobody really cared about. His mother had long bemoaned the fact that ‘her Nicky’ didn’t have one single, solitary, goddamned imaginative spark in his body. So why the hell was he giving himself over to so many wild imaginings now? Why the hell was he feeling almost poetic half the goddamned time? It made no sense. But then this was Shalom. And he’d long since conceded that nothing at all about Shalom made much sense. Which was how he and she…they…had gotten here. She’d kissed him in the middle of the street. For no apparent reason and without even the slightest concession to anything making any kind of sense, she’d stood up on tiptoe and pressed her mouth hard against his. Not a brushing of lips, not a fleeting pressure that was instantly relieved and removed almost before it began, it had been a definite kiss. A definite invitation, one he’d 141
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accepted with entirely too much eagerness, to open his mouth and allow her to slip him the tongue. Allow her to plunge as deeply as she could at that first awkward angle, with him standing firmly upright and her straining precariously to reach. And he wasn’t the only one who’d stood up perfectly straight. Not then, and sure as hell not now when Shalom was already drifting purposefully, as if guided by some kind of internal targeting mechanism he was at a complete loss to understand, toward his bedroom. “Wait.” The sound was garbled. It wasn’t a word at all, though Nick had fully intended it to be a word. It was so much not a word that Shalom paid it no attention. She didn’t even glance at him. She just kept going, deviously accurate and devilishly intent as if she’d studied her course for hours in advance and knew every possible pitfall along its route, toward the bedroom and… “Wait!” This time Nick did a little better. This time Shalom broke her stride long enough to pause. Long enough to glance back and up at him, a question burning in her dark-rimmed gray eyes. “I just thought…” But there he had to stop again. Had to stop permanently this time. Because he had no idea what he’d been thinking, no idea even what he might have wanted to be thinking. 142
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He was so confused. So absolutely, insanely confused by a level of wanting and needing he’d never felt before…a level that had very quickly reached the point of addiction to this copperhaired gorgeous woman he barely knew. This woman he still, despite all his efforts and determination to convince himself otherwise, believed was up to some kind of scheme. And the idea that he couldn’t convince himself, the idea that he couldn’t shake the dead certainty that she had some kind of nefarious ulterior motive only confused him more. Only confused him to the point that his head no longer seemed screwed on straight and his brain no longer seemed capable of rational, logical thought. Especially where selfpreservation was concerned. He was confused. So he just stood there, halfway across his barely furnished living room, and stared at her. Stared hard. Stared, he hoped, in the most piercing way imaginable. Stared in a way that would let her know he was onto her. That would let her think he was onto her. “What are you doing here?” he demanded, hoping he’d see the flash of guilt in her lovelierthan-life eyes and the admission of some kind of wrongdoing in her just as lovely face. But her expression remained blank. It remained questioning and, God help him and God help her, 143
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just about as innocent as any expression had ever been. It remained all of that in the briefest of split seconds before a look of complete and dejected disappointment sprang into her eyes. “You brought me here,” she said in a low voice, a husky and tortured one. “I thought you wanted…” And God help him again, because he did want. With every kind of hot surging imaginable or even possible he…his body…wanted exactly what she’d been about to offer before he’d tried to stop her. He wanted her to offer it again, so he could correct his idiotic blunder by accepting. “So.” Turning away from the bedroom door, altering her path the very smallest bit, just enough to take her to the battered leather sofa stretched out along the long wall across from the panorama windows, she took a step toward it. “What did you have in mind, then?” She took several steps before he reached out and caught her arm. Before he stopped her and before a choking, hurtful constriction started in his throat and quickly spread outward, threatening to destroy all of him, every part of him. “You,” he replied in a thin and strangled voice and knew instantly, knew by the look in her eyes, that it was all over. Her eyes flashed. Deep in their crystalline gray depths a flame sprang to life and began to twist slowly. Began to revolve upon itself and around 144
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itself like a tornado made up of multiple columns of pure, golden-white fire. Her lips parted very slightly and for just one more moment, one incredible moment when Nick lifted his shaking arms and opened them to her, she hesitated. She looked as confused and suspicious as he felt way down deep inside. And then she came to him. She crossed the short stretch of uncarpeted hardwood floor between them in record time and all but leaped into the waiting circle of his arms. She pressed herself tight against him in the same motion, her breath rasping a little as it escaped, all of it, in a long and quavering rush. Lifting her arms, she wrapped them around his shoulders and tightened them even before he had a chance to enclose her with his embrace. Even before he began to lower his face to hers, suddenly certain this would be the kiss to end all kisses. This would be the kiss to end all life, all sensibility, all thought or capability of thought. Nick ducked his head toward hers and she lifted her face to meet him. Lips already parted, she allowed him immediate entry, a low and desperate moan bursting from her in the instant when their mouths touched…the instant when his tongue slipped swiftly, naturally, effortlessly between her lips. She groaned with a soft and feral sound, 145
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opening her mouth wider still to encourage him and accommodate him. And she groaned again when he slipped deeper still. Her tongue entwined itself with his in a long and slow mutual tasting and mutual teasing. She groaned as she stroked her tongue along the full length of his in ways that sparked immediate results in other, already tortured beyond endurance, parts of his body. The responding kick in Nick’s groin was exactly that. A kick, low and hard. Jolting and imbued with lightning-power that felt for all the world like the kick of a real foot compressing everything that was vital. Everything that could be wounded irreparably and wounded disastrously. Now it was Nick’s turn to groan. And groan he did. The long agony of it escaped his throat before he had so much as a chance to think about holding it back. It escaped without any hope he could control it or hold it back. And when the sound hung quivering in seething air around them, Shalom shuddered in reply. She shuddered a very little, closing her teeth lightly around the fullness of his lower lip. “Mmmmm,” she murmured and tried at last, twining her body in a way that was bound to have the entirely opposite effect, to push herself away from him. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I don’t know why I ever thought…” “Don’t.” The word was a growl. As low and 146
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feral as any of the sounds she’d been making. Separated from him only partly, separated only from the shoulders up but to all intents and purposes joined completely with him everywhere else, Shalom tilted her head back to frown at him, “Don’t what?” “Don’t think.” Bending forward again, Nick was ready to claim her. But she turned her face away. Turned it and ducked it so that his kiss, intended to awaken more swirling columns of delirious and inescapable fire in both of them, fell harmless and heedless upon the soft cloud of coppery red at the top of her head. “I don’t want to force you to do something you don’t want to do,” she mumbled, her words all but lost in the solidity of his chest. Nick laughed softly. Releasing her with one arm only, he reached up. Reached for one of the hands that still held him, resting on the very points of his shoulders now as if she couldn’t quite convince herself to let him go completely, and caught it. And then he lowered it, clasped tightly between his hands and inserted it…inserted her hand and both of his…between their still closely pressed bodies. “Does this feel like I’m being forced to do anything against my will?” he countered, turning her hand around and releasing it partially so that her palm pressed tight against the agitated enormity of a dick turned harder, turned hotter 147
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and more painfully eager than it had ever been in all its less-than-glorious career. “N…no. But…” “Then don’t think, Shalom. Don’t do anything except…” She shuddered a little. Like she might be crying. Or maybe like she might be about to cry. Either way, that wasn’t a good thing. Not good at all. Because Nick couldn’t stand up to the pressure of tears. He couldn’t withstand the pain of having caused them and having to witness them. “Shalom, don’t.” “Th…there’s something I ought to tell you before we…you know.” “Fuck?” he suggested, the unaccustomed word a little strangled as he forced it out. “There’s something you need to know.” Well, hell. She wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know. Hadn’t already known almost from the first moment their lips touched and their bodies had stroked against each other, so long ago in his mind that he could hardly remember exactly how long ago it had been or even exactly where it had been. “I think I already know,” he murmured, taking note of the way she allowed herself to be encircled by his arms again, the way she kept her hand cupped around the heavy and throbbing length of him, the way she began to soften against him, 148
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“everything I need to know.” Damn! Had he said that? If he had, he certain as hell didn’t believe it. And neither, apparently, did Shalom. “You don’t,” she insisted, her head still ducked, her lips and the enticing shimmer of her eyes still denied him. “Then tell me later.” He had to let go of her again, the way he had before. With one arm. He had to slip the fingers of his hand beneath her chin and push firmly, push upward so she’d have no choice but to look at him. No choice but to let him see what was in her eyes. It was more than he expected. More than he’d ever expected. No longer a leaping and whirling column of pure fire, the sheen of light had mellowed and matured now. It had subsided into something much softer and much more subtle, though no less desirous and no less expressive. It had subsided into a deep-seated glimmering of pure hunger that seemed in the instant when he first glimpsed it to actually seep from every pore of her. From every softened and sweetened part of her. Hunger that not so much burned in the air between them and around them as inside them. Inside both of them. Nick could feel the hunger burning inside Shalom as clearly and unmistakably as he felt it burning inside himself. And it was hunger that would no longer be denied. Hunger that would no 149
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longer be delayed and could no longer be described by euphemism or as anything except exactly what it was. Hunger for each other. Hunger for the touch of each other. For the most intimate, the most personal and permanent of touches. He was going to fuck her this time. He was going to fuck her really and completely, in a way that quite honestly scared the be-Jesus out of him. Because he hadn’t wanted to fuck her. Hadn’t set out, in that long-lost and almost forgotten instant when he’d first seen her bending over her Mustang and realized he was destined to stick his foot into it, to do anything of the kind. Burned once in his youth, burned badly and left scarred and aching by the burning, he’d been so cautious in the rest of his life. That had come afterward. He’d been so careful who he became entangled with, been so scrupulous about knowing every woman and knowing her thoroughly before allowing himself to become entangled. He’d taken such enormous and sometimes over-zealous precautions to ensure he’d never again be burned…never again be taken for a fool by a virtual stranger who had one thing on her mind and one thing only. And where had it all gotten him? Here. To this moment in the middle of his living 150
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room. This moment when he found himself wrapped inexorably tight and hopelessly against this woman he knew only as a seductress with hidden agendas, a ripe and riveting enchantress who’d stolen his common sense and was now hard at work, using every weapon in her limitless and unimaginable arsenal, to steal all the rest. To steal his mind, his heart, his thoughts. His very body, that he’d long ago declared off-limits to all but the most solid and respectable, the most thoroughly known and understood of women. The most utterly and absolutely boring of women. That came as something of a shock. Came as more of an enlightening even than the continued movement of Shalom’s super-softened and unquestionably ready body against his or the shimmer of her tongue as it once again played with his, flicking softly and repeatedly. Flicking him with lingering tendrils of fire that once again burst, once again billowed. Once again became a virtual firestorm about to sweep them away. He’d been bored with the women he’d allowed into his life before her. He’d been bored shitless…bored in ways it seemed incredible a man could ever be bored when he had some willing, solid citizen at his disposal…some well-checked-out and respectable lady lying beneath him with her legs spread for him, begging him to… 151
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He’d been bored out of his mind precisely because all those other women were solid and respectable. But not now. Not any more. Not when he was holding Shalom and kissing her, not when he was guiding her toward his bedroom door. Guiding her in a way that couldn’t at all be good and yet at the same time was the best thing that had ever happened to him. Guiding her toward his bedroom, where he’d taken great and extensive pains never to guide one of his willing…boring…women before. This was Shalom, and no way was she boring. No way was she expected or explicable or even predictable. No way was he going to fuck her mindlessly, without protection. That was a hard and fast rule he’d made after that first time. A rule he adhered to with all the fervor of religious fanaticism. A rule he’d broken only once…a rule he’d very nearly broken the other day, when she’d caught him unawares and at a disadvantage in the park. That was a mistake he wasn’t about to almost make again, and he reached for the drawer in the bedside table the moment he pulled Shalom…or did she pull him?…within reach of the bed. Confident in the supply of protection he always kept in the immediate vicinity of any place where fucking might conceivably happen, he tugged the 152
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drawer open and reached inside in the same moment when Shalom came alive in his arms. In a way she’d never come alive before. He reached into the drawer in the same moment that she shoved hard against him and toppled him sideways across his king-sized bed. He reached inside and felt the last remaining foil packet slide out from under his groping fingertips. He felt it slither away with almost deliberate depravity and hide itself deep within the rest of the stuff that crowded the drawer. He felt himself lose his one chance at safety, and then he felt…felt…
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CHAPTER ELEVEN
N
ick stiffened beneath her. His body stiffened as they’d dropped backward across the bed, still intertwined. It stiffened in a way that said that even though she’d thought he wanted the same thing she wanted and was as ready for it as she’d been for a long, long time, he wasn’t ready at all. He didn’t want it…didn’t want her…at all. Shalom drew in a deep breath and started to speak. She had no idea what she might be about to say, but then the content of her speech wasn’t going to matter anyway. Because in the next instant, before she could draw in enough breath to utter so much as a single word, Nick came to life beneath her. Groaning softly, the way he’d been groaning almost from the instant they’d stepped into his apartment and come together, he pressed his mouth to hers, covered her barely parted lips with his, and began to kiss her. Not exactly the way he’d kissed her a minute or two before, or the 154
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way she’d kissed him then, either. This kiss had a new desperation to it. A new urgency that said he might still not be entirely on board with what she’d driven him to, but by God he was going to go through with it. By God, there was no way he could not go through with it. It wasn’t a romantic kiss. And his motions, all of them as he turned over and carried her with him, rolling her onto her back as if she had no more substance and no more ability to feel than a halfway worn-out rag doll, were not romantic either. Not in the least. Rolling her onto her back as the groans in the deepest depth of his throat turned to soft growls of mixed frustration and agitation, he reached beneath her skirt. Skimmed his fingers up and up, across legs worn bare in the July heat to the sturdy fabric of thoroughly unromantic cotton panties that stood between him and what he obviously wanted so desperately to have. What she wanted so desperately to give. His fingers found the waistband, and he pulled. Her panties slipped down in the same moment that she moved arms gone all sluggish and unresponsive, lifting them awkwardly to pull her thin tee shirt up and over her head…to fling it away to the farthest and most unknown corner of the bedroom she’d barely glimpsed in her rush to have him on the bed, have him beside her or on 155
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top of her. In her rush to have him. He slipped her panties down as far as he could and then, when they would slip no farther or maybe when his arm could reach no farther, he made an impatient bark of a sound and ripped them from her body. Her skirt followed, a little more easily since it was a wrap-and-tie style that gave itself readily to such swiftly fumbling, blind-eyed and desperate methods of undress. Somehow, they were naked. Somehow, as he’d been ripping at her clothing and tearing at it, fastening his mouth upon one of her pierced breasts in the first instant she’d exposed it to him, she’d stripped him of his clothing as well. She’d torn away the too-conservative white shirt that was nothing she’d ever choose for any man of hers to wear, had unfastened the equally conservative and ambiguous gray slacks and, more than a little surprised to discover he wore nothing at all beneath, had used hands and then feet, spreading her legs wider still as she lifted them at either side of him in her effort to shove the slacks down and shove them away. Somehow, they were naked. And Nick was stroking the rings in her nipples with the heated, searing, electrifying tip of his tongue. They were naked. And he was looking a question at her as he stroked and stroked, inciting pierced flesh rendered all too easily incitable and 156
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entirely too excitable by the piercings. “I…” What had she meant to say this time? She still had no idea. Words weren’t going to come easily to her. Not when they seemed destined to end in the kind of surprised scream she uttered when Nick caught her left nipple ring between his teeth very carefully and began to tug. Gently. Barely. But he was tugging all the same, as if he wanted her already taut nipple to rise and harden even more. As if he thought he could force it to respond by tugging. And it did respond. Her nipple screamed to life, screamed to even fuller and even more irreversible arousal. And she arched her body toward him, arched it upward almost painfully in her automatic and instinctive attempt to avoid the even greater, the brutal and scorching, potential pain of having the ring ripped straight from her flesh. Shalom arched her body into a high and tight bow, and the feelings that shot through her were sensations like none she’d felt in her life…mindless sensations, mind-filling and mindnumbing ones that tore another scream… another whole series of prolonged and protracted screams… from her lungs and lips as Nick, already poised directly at her opening by the lifting and spreading of her legs as she’d removed his clothes, gave up her nipple and the attendant 157
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ring at last and slipped inside. “Shit,” he muttered, and that wasn’t what she’d expected upon the very first penetration. Wasn’t what she’d expected at all. “I’m sorry.” But she wasn’t. She was too far gone, too far sunk into the swirling chaos of indescribable tinglings and twitchings that still swept through her body from the point where he’d tugged on her piercing. She was too far gone to be truly sorry about anything she’d said, anything she’d thought, anything at all that she’d done. Sorry could wait until later. Sorry would have to wait. Until much, much later. Because for now… “Fuck me,” she whispered, a fleeting thought of the number of points she might score this time whistling through her head and then vanishing into the same swirling, electrical mists that had long since claimed her body. “Shalom, I have to…” He was deep inside her. It had just happened, the way she opened instantly upon feeling the pressure he exerted without… she felt certain… ever meaning to exert any kind of pressure at all. She opened for him as if it was something she’d done every single day of her life, and he had slipped inside her just as easily, without any kind of effort on his part or any kind of resistance on hers. He slipped in as far as he could go. As far as 158
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his body and hers would allow. He was there right now. Held there by the pressure of her legs after they just naturally, without any conscious thought or input from a brain that still reeled at the idea of this actually happening to her, lifted to surround his waist. He was deep inside her, but he was trying hard not to be. Shalom could feel the tension build in his every muscle, could feel the desire to resist with everything he had overtake him as his body stiffened again. She could feel him shudder as he tensed more and quicker than he’d tensed before. He was uncomfortable. Preoccupied. And that made her nervous…made her falter and made her legs loose their grip, threatening to fall away as her confusion mounted. “What is it?” she whispered, already mourning the sweetly shocking sensation that had begun to fade away from her…the sweet shock of finding him inside her and discovering he was more enormous than she’d ever known him to be. The shock of discovering he filled her in ways it had never seemed possible or probable, romance novels and Carly’s ribald fairy tales notwithstanding, for any man to truly fill a woman. Until she overflowed from the filling. Until she stretched to her limit and there was no more room for accommodation, no more room for hard male flesh that had been designed 159
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specifically and perfectly to stretch and fill. Hard male flesh that still tried, despite her body’s reluctant and almost too subtle protests, to stretch and to fill more. “We shouldn’t…” Another shudder shook Nick’s body. A deep-rooted and unmistakable one this time. One that sprang from some part of him he couldn’t control. “Nick, I didn’t mean to…if you want to…” Of course he did. She knew he did. He wanted to leave her. It was clear from the way he seemed to fight with himself and within himself, clear from the way he seemed to want desperately to relax his body even as another part of him struggled to tense it and pull it away from what had caused the tension in the first place…wanted to pull out of her every inch of what he had pressed so deeply into her. Shalom could feel the desire to leave her roll off him in waves, like the sweat that beaded his brow and slithered unheeded down the sides of his face to lose themselves in dark golden hair at his temples. She knew he wanted to leave and with the same kind of inexplicable, almost instinctive knowing, she knew he couldn’t when his hips started to move. When he began to pump violently in and out, eyes closed and jaw clenched, muscles tightened and leaping beneath dusky skin with the effort of wanting not to do what it was all too 160
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obvious his body had to do. It was like rape. Maybe it even was rape. A very passive form of rape, since she lay pliant and motionless beneath him, her legs no longer holding him tight, no longer holding him at all as he continued his mindless, tortured pumping into and out of her already moist and steadily responsive body. If it was truly rape, then it had to be the very most passive form of it known to man, since she was doing nothing at all to resist the episode even as she did nothing at all to encourage it or aid it. Maybe it was mutual rape, with both of them obviously in difficulty and obviously wanting it to end, yet neither of them able to put a stop to it. Maybe it was… And then Nick stopped. Suddenly. Completely. Once again he’d embedded himself inside her to a truly incredible depth that should have been, that could with a very little effort on his part or her part have been truly spectacular and truly memorable. And then he’d stopped so abruptly, holding her pinned beneath him, straightening his arms to raise his shoulders away from her. The hard and impaling length of the flesh he’d buried within her began to feel uncomfortable. Began to feel even a little hurtful, now that her initial, joyous burst of welcoming moisture had subsided and left her unprepared and unready for more 161
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thrusts. For more penetrations. “You’re not enjoying this,” he said, staring straight into her eyes, his emerald gaze dark with concern and something else she couldn’t, or maybe didn’t want to name. “It’s…” Lifting a hand…a weak and tremulous hand…she made a feeble gesture. “Not what I th…thought it would b…be.” And that was the understatement of the year. Because this wasn’t anything like what she’d thought it would be. Not based on their first couple of contacts, when the sex, or the potential for sex and the building toward sex that had never quite, never actually, happened had been explosive. More than explosive. When it had been downright killing in its pleasure and its promise that, should he ever decide to finish the act completely, in the way such acts had been meant to be finished, it would be the most incredibly satisfying, the most incredibly memorable and unforgettable sex she would ever in her life have. But this thrusting that was mindless, this dry and desperate thrusting that was almost a careless thrashing against her and inside her, wasn’t like any of the things she’d imagined. Especially not with Nick. Especially not with the one man who seemed in imminent danger of claiming her heart and making her… To Shalom’s horror, tears suddenly filled her eyes and overflowed. Without warning. One 162
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minute she was dry-eyed and confused, wondering why he awakened in her no feelings of that expected and longed-for sweet intimacy. Why the deep thrustings of his body into hers lived up to none of the promise of that first, incredibly stimulating and mind-reeling moment when he’d tugged upon her nipple ring and nearly sent her screaming and soaring through the ceiling. “We shouldn’t be doing this.” Nick moved again, moved more definitely this time, to back out of her. To pull himself out of her and away from her, perhaps permanently. Almost certainly permanently. “No!” Too late, Shalom tried to recapture him. Too late, she tried to hold him where he would not be held. Because the separation was complete. Because he was outside her and they’d become separate individuals again. He was on hands and knees above her, looking like he might start to cry, too. And the image of him blurred to a formless and senseless nothingness as her tears began to flow for real. As her heart suddenly shuddered to a quick and painful stop. As it resumed beating again immediately, but in an all-new, broken and never-to-be-whole-again fashion. “You weren’t enjoying it,” Nick murmured, staring down at her with incredible eyes that continued to mirror confusion and an all new kind of torment, the engorged length of him held inches 163
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away from her. Held so close to her and yet so immeasurably, so hopelessly far away. “I…” Exercising the full power of her will, Shalom managed to stop crying. She managed to blink the remainders of the tears she’d already shed from her eyes so that she could see him. “It wasn’t what I thought it would be,” she whispered, barely controlling a shudder that rose to the surface. “That’s all. It wasn’t what I wanted it to be.” “And what was that?” he asked, sounding like he really wanted to know, like he really wanted to give it to her if he possibly could. If he humanly could. “What did you want it to be, Shalom?” Nervous, she stared up at him. “You were so…preoccupied,” she replied, the full extent of her heartbreak and disillusion creeping into her voice at last. “You weren’t really with me, and that’s not the way I wanted it. That’s not the way it was supposed to be. It wasn’t doing anything to me. Wasn’t doing anything for me.” Instantly, Nick looked contrite. “I’m sorry. I just don’t usually have unprotected sex. Don’t usually run the risk of…” “I’m okay,” she murmured. “I haven’t been with anyone since high school. And even then it was…” She shuddered again. “But I don’t have any…” “That’s not what I’m talking about.” “If you want protection, Nick…if you’re too 164
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uncomfortable…” Suddenly his features seemed to melt. Seemed to soften and change form right before her eyes as he came to her again. As he lowered himself, more slowly this time and more deliberately, to brush the hot and throbbing tip of his shaft against her opening. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t being fair to you. I wasn’t giving you a chance to…I never even bothered to find out what you like. What you expect and what you need.” “It’s okay.” Shuddering again, with delight now that he’d taken it slow and urged the tiniest morsel of himself, inserting no more than the smallest bit of his gently rounded and perfectly sculpted tip between the folds of her flesh, Shalom closed her eyes. She waited for a moment, enjoying the changing pressures as Nick began to rotate his hips again. As he shoved a little, an infinitesimal bit harder, shoving in a way that caused the deep moistening and softening to begin inside her again. A way that caused it to begin in earnest. For real this time. Sighing, she lifted her legs. She tucked them up high and tight against her body, tucked them firmly against her breasts so that her kneecaps rubbed repeatedly, enticingly across the pierced peaks of her nipples. So that the small rings pressed deeper into the flesh that held them with an immediate wave of pain that wasn’t really a wave of pain at all as much as a wave of 165
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shimmering desire. Curling her body into a tucked position, Shalom pressed the soles of her feet to broad shoulders that leaned over her and close to her as Nick once again took her. As he slipped deep into her. As he shimmered into her, inch by exhilarating inch, taking her and claiming her, stroking endless moisture and endless spark-showered currents of desire for more from every single inch of her as he did so. “This is…” “Is this better for you?” he asked, pausing when he reached her full depth. Pausing, then shoving again. Shoving harder and almost impatiently as if he thought some deeper depth still remained and he was being denied entry to it. As if he thought there was somewhere else he could go and something else he could do to… “Is this what you wanted, Shalom?” In response, she rolled her head mindlessly, trying to nod because that was the only rational way she could hope to respond. Because that was the only kind of response she was capable of making and yet incapable of making. Because she’d long since gone past the point of making any sensible reply at all. She’d long since gone past the point even of being able to nod. “Is this what you expected?” Saying that, he thrust again. Thrust harder against the deepest inner recesses of her. 166
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He thrust, and she rolled her head in the same aimless fashion that seemed the only voluntary movement left to her. He thrust so hard that her body tried to open again, tried to open still more, in some incalculable way that wasn’t physically possible and couldn’t be physically possible. He thrust and with the thrusting seemed to find some new and never before tapped hidden part of her. And with the tapping came a gush of moisture from the very bottom of that unsuspected depth. Pressing his body down hard upon her neatly folded legs as he shoved, Nick laughed softly. “The penetration is incredible,” he murmured appreciatively, changing his steady forward pressure to a gentle side to side rocking that elicited a low murmur of sheer delight from her. Followed by a scream of sheer delight. “Oh, God!” she cried, her head tipping back as he shoved once again, just hard enough and just far enough that she slid backward across the slick silk of the bedspread. Just hard enough and just far enough that her head dropped into open space, her shoulders poised at the very edge of the bed. Nick said something else, something she didn’t hear and couldn’t understand, as he took up a rocking-rotating combination of movements that drew moisture from her again, in enormous waves and bursts. Movements that urged her to widen 167
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even more to accommodate him. Movements that rendered her legs weak and maybe even paralyzed as they tightened even more against her body, useless now for any purpose except to steadily massage, enticingly massage, the heated metal of tiny golden rings into her heated flesh. The rings were tiny, but they suddenly felt enormous. Incredibly enormous as her nipples strained around them. As her nipples tightened and thrust, trying desperately to find even half the satisfaction…even one tenth the satisfaction…those unexpected inner depths of her had found with Nick. In Nick. Through Nick. “Oh, God,” she whispered and when she tried to lift her head to look at him, to see what he would reveal with his eyes and the expression on his face, she discovered she couldn’t. She no longer had strength to move. No longer had the desire. Opening her eyes, staring sightlessly and senselessly at the blue fold of curtains at the wide window next to the bed, she groaned once. Only once, only in sheer and unparalleled longing that this could go on forever. That this would never stop and never have to stop. That Nick would never want to stop. “Is this doing it for you?” he asked, his voice so breathless and tight with the impending explosion that hovered between them that it might have 168
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been the voice of a complete stranger. A completely uncontrolled stranger. “Is this what you longed for, Shalom? Is it what you imagined, and what you…” The rest of his words were lost, drowned out by the sudden rising thunder of her heart as he shoved yet again. As the pressure of him inside her aroused her to the fullest. As her body released the greatest, the most unexpected deluge of warm radiance and unadulterated satisfaction imaginable inside her.
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CHAPTER TWELVE
H
e’d forgotten sex without protection could feel this way. In all the years since he’d so ill advisedly given into desire that had urged him to fuck the one person he should never have fucked because she was too treacherous to be fucked safely, he’d forgotten the delightful slide of bare and uninhibited flesh slipping into moistened flesh. Velvet flesh that clung to him. Flesh that, unseparated from his by even the thinnest barrier of the most supple latex, set up repeated shimmerings of unbelievable proportion inside his. This was much better. Like Shalom had said, that first part…that mindless and soulless animal copulation…hadn’t been anything to write home about. It hadn’t been anything at all, except something that would shame him whenever he thought about it, right up until the instant he died. That first part had been terrible. 170
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For both of them. But this…now… Shalom was more relaxed. She was completely relaxed, completely in sync with each and every movement of his body, each and every thrusting of his dick into flesh that was hotter than he’d ever imagined and wetter than he ever could have imagined. She was relaxed, she was aroused, she lay gasping beneath him, crying out for God to have mercy, God to look out for her, God to… She was ready. Completely and inarguably ready, for whatever might come next. In whatever form it might come. Nick shuddered hard as he thrust the full length of his scorching, aching, throbbing dick into the softness that welcomed it. Softness that tried to soothe and tried to comfort, but only ended up inflaming more. Only ended up torturing more because its very softness was an agony. Its very ripe and bursting eagerness was meant to incite suffering no man should have to endure. Suffering no man should have to survive. Shalom was wet. Hot. Soft. Pliant. Comfortable at the same time that she was excruciating. She was everything he’d ever wanted. Everything he’d always wanted and always feared…everything he’d never dared to find because he been afraid to find. Afraid even to try. Deathly afraid of the results and repercussions 171
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should he ever, by sheerest accident of coincidence, manage to find. He’d feared those results. Feared the repercussions too, with all the horror of fear it was possible for any one man to know. Only now he couldn’t remember what he had feared. Couldn’t remember why he had feared. Couldn’t remember why he had ever believed there was anything to fear. “God,” he murmured, balancing himself on one trembling and unsteady arm so that he could lift the other to stroke the gleaming and sweat-soaked softness of blazing-red hair turned darker, turned an almost supernatural and indescribably enticing shade of maroon by the drenching, away from her throat. Clearing the way for a kiss he had to plant there, had to bestow upon the long and backwardtilted column of exposed and rosy flesh she presented to him. A kiss that burned on his lips, desperate to be shared as he placed his hand back against the bed and lowered himself, lowered the whole shaking, tortured length of his body, closer to her. A kiss that had to be shared, because he would die if it wasn’t. “God,” he murmured and ran his tongue along the rapidly pulsing and vulnerable flesh of the throat she’d exposed when she’d dropped her head back over the side of the bed. “Sweet God,” he groaned, nipping gently at the softest part of that throat, nipping at the tightly stretched yet still 172
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pliant fold of flesh just below the upthrust point of her delicious and perfectly shaped chin. “God!” she shrieked in reply, her body tightening below his and then bucking up, trying to take even more of his. “God!” they both shouted, now acting as one being instead of two. Now becoming one instead of two. She was ready. More than ready. She was seething inside. She was alternately gripping and then releasing his dick with flesh gone wild. Flesh gone vicious and just the slightest, just the most titillating and unnerving bit uncivilized in its determination to have him and keep on having him for as long as she wanted. As long as she desired. As long as she felt the need. She was wet. Was heated, to the point her flesh seemed almost to sizzle against his, as destructive as a branding iron and every bit as scarring wherever and whenever it came into contact with his. She was undeniably ready, and Nick had forgotten everything except a deep and overwhelming desire to please her. A desire to do anything necessary, risk anything necessary, subject himself to anything necessary if it would just, please God in Your perfect and shining Heaven, please his incredibly lovely, his incredibly wonderful Shalom. She was ready. And hadn’t he heard 173
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somewhere, hadn’t he read that when a woman was this ready…when she was aroused to babbling and clenching softness, when she was aroused to full wetness…that there was a way, there was a method… Shivering, wanting more than ever to please her with every move he made and every stroking touch he offered, Nick groped for her ankles and, finding one, urged her leg to extend to its fullest. He urged it out of its tight and slightly twisted confinement to the tune of a small groan from her. Coaxing it until it straightened, stroking gently until cramped muscles released, he tucked her leg between his arm and his body. Tucked it reverently and then held it snugly, held it tight so that it stretched and strained against the side of his chest, seeming to reach for something unattainable, something completely desirable but which no leg had ever been designed or intended to reach for. He trapped her one leg and then, reaching with his other hand for the leg that remained folded tight between them, he caught her ankle and once again began the soft but irresistible coaxing. The gentle but inexorable straightening of muscle and tendon and tissue that almost seemed incapable of releasing after its tight confinement between their joined bodies. Their bodies that remained steadfastly joined, steadfastly rendered into one, steadfastly seared 174
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into a single entity by the pulsing length that connected them inextricably. The flesh that, once penetrated fully into hers and once clutched by the silken smoothness of hers, had no desire ever to reside anyplace else. No desire even to know anyplace else. He coaxed her second leg to straighten. But this time, rather than tuck it beneath his arm and trap it with his body he lifted it high. Lifted it all the way to his shoulder and rested her foot there. He spread her legs wider than he thought they’d ever been spread before…spread her in a way he felt almost certain, if her slight hissing intake of surprised breath and the shocked glitter in gray eyes that lifted all too briefly to search out his intentions in the expression on his face, she’d never been spread before. “You are sweet,” he murmured, taking time to insert himself much more slowly now…much more carefully. With much more thought for her enjoyment and her satisfaction. He took his time. Took her inch by quivering, straining, gasping, delightful inch. Continued to take her that way even when something at the back of his mind and something else, something buried deep, deep inside balls that now felt anguish like none they’d ever expected to feel in this or any lifetime, screamed at him to go for it. When that same something shrieked inside his head, shrieked silently but still with enough force 175
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to make his head spin and his ears ring, that he should take her, take her hard, take her now! Before she reconsidered. Before she realized what he was doing slow degree by infinitely slow and luscious degree and rebelled. Before she spurned him and forced him away from her. Inside his mind, every animal instinct had come alive. Every one of them urged him to fuck her. Fuck her completely. Urged him with shrieking and hissing voices to never stop fucking her until… But that wasn’t the way he wanted it. That wasn’t ever the way he’d wanted it. Not with Shalom…not with the sweetest and most delightful woman he’d ever had the pleasure to touch, much less the opportunity to take for his own. It would be criminal to take Shalom that way. And so he continued to defy instinct and compulsion, continued to enter her as slowly as he possibly could. Heated and pounding, his flesh shimmered slowly and deliberately against equally heated flesh that softened instantly beneath his invading touch. Flesh that moistened in welcome, parting with heart-shattering willingness before each and every pressure he chose to exert. Flesh that closed again immediately as it accepted him…closed tightly, enveloping him and cradling him deep within some secret, hidden 176
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fold no man before him had known. No man before him had found, or plumbed, or sampled. Flesh that was his. For eternity, if that was how long he wanted it. And, shuddering at the same time that he cried out in a long and sibilant murmur of perfect exultation, eternity was exactly what Nick wanted. Eternity was everything he wanted. Eternity wasn’t even half of what he wanted. Beneath him, her eyes closed and her legs twisted just slightly in the effort he’d forced her to make, the effort to open her body in ways that hadn’t come entirely naturally to her, ways that might not be the most perfectly comfortable for her, Shalom answered his long sighing of sound with one of her own. “Am I?” she questioned, her flesh still tightening around him as it took him ever farther, ever more deeply in. He’d reached his limit. Buried inside her, the full and as yet unsatisfied length of him lost entirely inside her, he paused. To look down at her. To watch the soft rippling of emotions…of wonder, of awe, of delirium…slip across her features, fading magically one into the other until all were lost, all vanished, all became nothing more than a fleeting memory. To watch every emotion appear there in its turn except for fear and revulsion. Those two seemed to have been banished. 177
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Those two were allowed no place in this moment they shared. This moment that, even as Nick had barely begun to share it and barely begun longing to have it last for that eternity of which he’d dreamed, began its inevitable conclusion. As much as he wanted to, as much as he tried to will himself to, Nick couldn’t remain inside her forever. His need was too great. His need had become a harsh burning, searing him with the pain of trying to hold back, the pain of trying to deny what he wanted more than anything else…more, even, than eternity. Crying out, his voice harsh and clotted with rising need that would not be met in any other way, rising need that would not be delayed or refuted for a moment longer, Nick pulled himself back. Barely taking time to feel, much less enjoy, the potent drag of flesh only reluctantly parting from his, he pulled himself back with all the speed and desperation he’d denied on his entry. He pulled back and then without hesitation, without even thinking about hesitation, moved immediately forward again. Moved forward twice as forcefully as he’d moved before. Forcefully enough to draw from Shalom a low and hazy groan that might have been a rumbling of surprise, but wasn’t. A groan that might have been a protestation of discomfort at the sudden rough handling, but wasn’t anything like that, either. A 178
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groan that expressed, as no words ever could and no expression ever had, the depth of what she was feeling. The way she’d obviously started to feel some of what Nick himself felt right now…a female version of what he felt right now. For a fraction of a second he wondered how it must be for her. How it must feel to be invaded this way…to have the very innermost depths of her, the very most private and sacred depths of her revealed to him in a way that allowed for no more secrets, no shyness and no modesty at all. For just a fraction of a second he wondered, before the flooding hunger overtook him again. Cold, hard hunger that stabbed at him with killing knives and wouldn’t be satisfied no matter what Shalom did, no matter how she tightened the leg he held at his side or the one he’d propped upon his shoulder. No matter how she tried to use them, tightening each muscle in its turn from the bottoms of her feet all the way to the place where creamy thighs joined the soft swell of hips that had the power to drive him mad…that delightful place that, now awakened, seemed more determined than ever to close around him and seize him. But she did try. To hold him with legs that could do nothing of the kind. She tried to shove him harder and deeper into her, or maybe to pull herself more securely onto him. She tried. But it was easy for him to overpower 179
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her now that need had taken hold. Now that the hunger had become uppermost in his mind, canceling out any thought save of the delight he’d found inside her. She tried, but the masculine animal in him had been awakened and was on the prowl. Determined to carry through what had to be the primary purpose with any aroused and aggravated male animal. The masculine animal inside Nick, the one he’d held so carefully at bay for so long and controlled so scrupulously for even longer, would not be stopped now. The masculine animal meant to fuck the female animal completely. Meant to fuck her to an end that could only be sublime, could only be superlative, could only be stunning in the ferocity of its mastery of her and its victory over her. The masculine animal had her. And it would keep her. A dark and shattered sob tore from Nick’s throat as he caught at Shalom’s ass and helped her lift her straining body higher onto his dick. Cupping the firm and tight rounds, he caressed them at the same time, marveling at the feel of satin skin that set his dick to throbbing all over again…set it to throbbing harder. And he sobbed again. This time he sobbed her name. “Shalom.” When he said it that way, all but lost in the throes of some ecstatic mesmerism great 180
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enough to drown him, great enough to sweep him away and erase him completely from any existence he’d ever known or ever hoped to know, her name was indeed the blessing it had been meant to be. The sound of her name, murmured by a throat in the deepest anguish of extremity, conveyed everything it had been intended to convey, for the long and still longer centuries during which it had been a highly regarded and even revered word meant to convey endless meanings. A word meant to convey a kind of richness and wholeness few attained in their lives…a certainty that what instinct declared was right was indeed right, and what was true had to be true. A word that declared it was okay to be vulnerable, perfectly acceptable to allow vulnerability if from the vulnerability came… Shuddering, lost so deep in the rich wholeness of his own particular, private wonder of Shalom, Nick hardly dared think it. Hardly dared allow the word to slip into his consciousness. Hardly dared to allow it to apply to him, to them, to something that had begun to spring up between the two of them in that very first, awe-inspiring and never to be duplicated instant of their initial meeting. Love. If shalom, the concept, meant the beginning and the ending, the hello and the goodbye, then that was what Shalom the woman meant to him. She 181
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was the joy that nurtured his soul, the stability that gave it security, the fulfillment that freed him from all fears that he’d ever want for anything again. He didn’t know what the hell love was. Didn’t have a clue. But in that moment, with all of those lovely words and concepts swirling inside a mind left half mad by the desire to have Shalom forever in the same way he was having her now, in this instant, Nick thought he’d come close to describing it. As close, probably, as any mortal man had ever come to describing a concept that was more akin to stardust and moonlight and faerie wings than to any real and tangible thing or substance. Love. Murmuring softly, lowering himself just enough that he could sniff at the gentle loveliness of her cloud of coppery hair, Nick sighed. And once again, whether he’d meant it to be so or whether it had been purely and entirely accidental, the sound he made was a way of speaking her name. “Shalom,” he whispered, his eyes squeezed tight shut as suddenly, with monstrous, thunderbolt force, the hungry desire inside him stirred and solidified into something else. Something that was not, now or ever again, going to be denied. Something that rose inside him in 182
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white-hot slivers of intensity to scald from the inside out, to brand him permanently in ways he could not explain in places that could never be seen. Places that would never be anything but a reminder of the agony…the sweet, supreme, rapturous and almost unsurvivable agony of… “I want you,” he said around a shudder, the lightning rocketing to the surface even as he tried desperately, tried without any reasonable hope of success, to hold it back. “You have me,” she murmured, smiling a little. A very, very little. Her smile was his undoing. That, and the sudden softening of every part of her. A softening that made the penetration he’d achieved, already deep beyond words and exhilarating beyond compare, that much deeper. That much more profound and that much more debilitating. “I don’t mean…” Nick shivered as lightning poured from him. As it flowed free, sparking enormous currents of his desire and his need from him into her. As it…he…filled her with his essence, with the potent promise of what until this moment, this barely rational and yet entirely rational moment, he’d denied himself the chance to share with any woman. Denied himself the right or the freedom to share with any woman. He knew there was a reason he hadn’t shared. Knew the memory of it would come back to him, 183
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probably to haunt him, in the hours to come. But for right now, Shalom was all there was. She was all that mattered. For the endless fleck of time in which they clung together, joined in absolute and primal bliss, there was nothing in the world except her and the softness that was her. Softness that flexed and contracted around him as the last of the lightning escaped. As his breath grew short and his muscles weakened, as the end approached with a last shuddering burst of fluid heat that separated instantly from his body as he joined with her and became an integral and essential part of her. “Shalom,” he murmured, surprised to discover she still clung to him. She still clung tight, her muscles losing none of their efficacy as had his. She clung almost tighter than ever, her small and perfectly formed body quaking wildly, quaking so hard it almost jerked in rhythm with the explosive pounding of his heart. She clung, her legs somehow around his waist again, the lower half of her body raised to meet the shaft that still held her, ineffectual now and losing its rigid vitality since the lightning strikes had subsided to a pale and shallow sunset glow that barely penetrated the fog of weariness engulfing him. She was perfect. His perfect dream of a woman. And he… 184
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Groaning deep in his throat, groaning in sheer agony of disappointment at his own weakness and his own inability to outlast her, Nick felt his arms begin to tremble. Felt them begin to give way. And then they did. Then he dropped, a pathetic shell of the man he’d been just moments before, onto the bed next to her and partially on top of her, her pinioning legs still refusing to let him go. Refusing to let him be.
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CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“W
e’re down to the wire now, girlfriend,” Carly said the instant Shalom picked up the phone, before she had time to do so much as grunt a grudging ‘hello’. “Time’s a wastin’! You have any points to report?” Groaning, Shalom glanced at the alarm clock. “Five A.M.?” she moaned, “I had a whole hour left to sleep, Carly!” “Well, you know we can’t talk about this at work…” “Shit,” Shalom mumbled under her breath, taking exquisite care to cover the phone’s mouthpiece with her hand. She didn’t want to talk about it at all. She didn’t think she’d earned any points with this latest escapade, because the whole situation with Nick O’Hara, the whole sexual situation, had indeed begun to mean something. Had begun to mean more than she’d ever dreamed it was possible for it to mean. 186
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And wasn’t that the whole point? Weren’t the points earned by having sex that, according to that asinine and inane e-mail joke she wished she’d never seen or heard of, meant nothing? Sex that ‘didn’t count’? Shalom thought that was the point. And she sure as hell didn’t want to admit her failure to Carly. Because Carly would laugh at her. Carly would call her all kinds of a fool. Footloose and fancy-free Carly who’d always said she had no intention of ever getting married again after that early fiasco with Eddie, or even getting serious, would no doubt take back all the points Shalom had earned. Then where would Shalom be? And did it really matter, anyway, as long as she ended up with Nick? As long as she found some kind of way to tell him about the decidedly shabby trick she’d played on him with this whole bizarre and ill-advised set-up? Some kind of way that wouldn’t anger him to the point he’d never want to see her, never want to so much as hear the mention of her name again. “Okay.” Carly’s voice crackled again in her ear. “Spill it.” “Didn’t I go first the last time?” Shalom hedged, more undecided than ever if she really wanted to spill anything at all. “Does it matter?” Carly persisted, her tone making it clear she wasn’t about to be put off a 187
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second longer. “It does to me.” “Well, then. You pulled this same trick last time, Shal. You hemmed and hawed and insisted I had to go first. Which I did. So now it’s your turn. You’re up, and I want to hear all about it before I say a word.” Shalom sighed. Carly was right. As she always seemed to be right. About Shalom’s life being a boring and predictable monotony…until the episode of Nick O’Hara had gotten started, at any rate. About the bet being just what she’d needed to shake her out of her stale lethargy. About… Shalom didn’t want to think about how else Carly might have been right. Because that was bound to lead down a couple of other paths exactly like the one she was on right now. Paths she didn’t want to follow because they were only going to wind up in places she’d rather not go. Not with Carly for company, anyway. “Am I to assume you’ve given up?” Carly asked, and there was something new in her voice. Something just slightly smug and somehow more…settled. If that was a way a woman’s voice and Carly’s voice in particular could be said to sound. “You sound different, Carly. You sound…” “So, I was right. You have given up.” “Did I say that?” 188
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“You didn’t need to, Shal. I can hear it in your voice. Because you sound different, too. Like…” Carly paused and Shalom groaned inwardly. Carly was thinking. Shalom could feel her thinking, and thinking madly. In another minute or two she was going to jump to some wild conclusion or other, was maybe even going to jump to the right conclusion, that Shalom had gotten herself into a place she’d never imagined getting herself into. Some wild conclusion that Shalom was feeling guilty because she’d started to have feelings for Nick O’Hara under all the wrong pretenses…under all the most egregiously false and horrifically self-serving of pretenses. Then Carly jumped. And it wasn’t quite the way Shalom had thought she was going to jump. “You broke it off with your Nate, didn’t you?” “Nick, Carly. His name is Nick.” “Whatever. You broke it off. I can hear it in your voice. Can’t I?” Sick to death of lies, not wanting to perpetrate any more, Shalom knew she was going to tell. Everything. She knew she was going to lose the bet. But she wasn’t quite ready yet. Wasn’t quite ready to hear ‘I told you so’ or ‘how could you get so out of control, Shal?’, or any of the half-dozen other bet-losing things Carly was all too likely to say. “You go first,” she said, still hard at work 189
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buying time before she had to face the end. “It’s your turn, Carly.” Carly sighed a little. Paused a little. And some…a lot…of the chortling glee was gone from her voice when she said, “I hooked up with my landlord this time. I hooked up with Mitch Patterson.” “The one who’s been coming on to you ever since you moved in? Ever since you got your sofa wedged in the front door and he had to help you pry it loose?” Shalom sat straight up on the edge of her bed, all her own difficulties and woes forgotten. “Uh-huh.” Now, this was interesting. This was exciting. This was something Shalom had never expected. Not even from good old liable-to-do-anyoutrageous-thing Carly. Mitch, the landlord, was good-looking. In a bikerish and offbeat sort of way. He was the kind of man who gave off a strong feeling he’d like nothing more than to settle down with some good, slightly bikerish woman and have a whole tribe of slightly bikerish kids who’d grow up to ride Harleys. He was persistent, too, always looking at Carly with an expression of open, slightly burning admiration and affection in his eyes. He was everything Carly had tried studiously to avoid ever since her parents had split in the bitterest divorce known to mankind when Carly 190
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was ten years old. And that meant Carly was… “You’re treading on dangerous ground,” Shalom warned. “And I think you know it.” Now it was Carly’s turn to sigh. Her turn to hem and haw. To pause not for dramatic effect but very obviously to regroup her thoughts and decide what she was going to say next. “Well,” she began at long last, with a tentativeness and uncertainty Shalom had never heard before filling her voice. “Like I said, Mitch and I…” “So it’s Mitch, now?” Shalom really was reeling at this latest development. “What happened to ‘The Scumbag in A1’?” “Do you want to hear this, Shal? Or do you not?” “I’m waiting with breath bated.” “Then shut up and let me talk. Huh?” Grinning to herself, more entertained by Carly’s sudden but self-inflicted dilemma than she’d ever thought she’d be entertained by anything, Shalom bit her lip and didn’t offer any one of the fifteen or so comebacks that sprang to the tip of her tongue. “Go ahead,” was all she said. “Well, I ran into Mitch in the hallway by the mailboxes yesterday. Just like I always seem to run into Mitch in the hallway every time I stop to check my mail.” Shalom fought back a snort. Well, what the hell 191
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was so new and exciting about that? Carly ran into Mitch in the hallway all the time because Mitch made sure she ran into him in the hallway all the time. “…decided to give it a go,” Carly had gone on, though Shalom figured she probably hadn’t missed all that much. She was pretty familiar with the way Carly worked. She knew all about the ways Carly could switch on sexuality whenever she wanted, like a big, red, blazing cathouse light right above her head with the words ‘come and get me, I’m yours for the taking’ emblazoned in block letters across its grotesquely oversized lens. “I invited him in for wine and cheese.” Now, that was a picture. Too much of a picture for Shalom to remain silent a second longer. “I just can’t imagine Mitch The Bad Biker sitting on your little flowered sofa, eating delicate little chunks of cheese and sipping white wine from a crystal glass.” “In the first place, it was red wine. Dark, dark red. And we never made it to the sofa or the cheese.” “Oh?” Shalom’s voice turned arch with amusement. “Do tell!” This just got better and better. And better and better and better. “You know Mitch has a wife.” Shalom hadn’t known. But she guessed that hadn’t been enough to stop Carly when Carly was 192
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on a mission. So she didn’t make any of the shocked protestations she would have made just a week ago…less than a week ago. She only grunted, a sound that urged Carly to go on. “Actually, the divorce is just about final. I didn’t know this before last night, but Mitch has been going through hell with this woman, who’s the Wicked Witch of the West or something. She’s put him through the ringer, taken everything he owned except his bike, and he only got to keep that because the judge insisted Witchy-Poo had to give him something.” “What’s this got to do with our bet, Carly? It’s not like you to get so deeply involved that you start prying personal information out of…” “I’m getting to that, Shal. Mitch and I did Number Thirteen.” “Thirteen?” Shalom was getting a headache from all the ups and downs of this distinctly bizarre and completely unexpected conversation. “You know I don’t have a copy of the list. What’s Number Thirteen?” Paper rustled at the other end of the phone line. “Number Thirteen,” Carly said, apparently reading from what by now had to be a very tattered and overworked copy of the list that had started it all. The list of Ways Sex Doesn’t Count. “That’s sex to make a married person feel better about themselves. But it only counts if you don’t know the other half of the couple. Which I don’t, 193
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so…” “Anything else?” Shalom sighed, wondering for at least the millionth time if this whole mess was going to turn out to be worth it in the end. “Well, of course it would be Number Five, sex with a friend.” “Since when did you and Mitch Scumbag-in-A1 get to be friends, Carly?” “He’s not a scumbag. And of course we’re friends. It was just a little friendly banter, something we shared the way we shared hot sex last night.” “Well, you could have fooled me. I was pretty certain…” “And I guess it was Number Seven, too. Sex with an old flame doesn’t count.” Shalom didn’t even go there. The idea of calling Mitch ‘Scumbag’ Patterson an old flame was as bad as the idea of him sitting on Carly’s flowered couch eating cheese. But Carly seemed to know what she’d been thinking. “You know I’ve always thought he was kind of cute in his own hairy way,” she declared defensively. Shalom only snorted again. Harder. “So that makes him an old flame.” Shalom snorted one more time. “And of course it’s a Twenty-Three, too. Since he lives in A1 and I live in A3, and that makes us…” 194
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“Let me guess. Sex with your next-door neighbor doesn’t count.” Carly laughed, and her laugh had changed too. It was lighter than Shalom had heard it before, lighter and more tinkling than it had been in a long, long, long time. Lighter and more tinkling than it had been ever. In a sudden flash of insight, wondering if Carly herself realized it yet, Shalom concluded Carly had it bad for Mitch, the Scumbag in the next apartment. And that made it a little easier…a hell of a lot easier…for her when Carly finished up by proclaiming she’d earned four points in the latest escapade. And what did Shalom have to say for herself on the subject? Sighing again, Shalom came right out and admitted it. “I didn’t do so good in the points department this time, Carly.” “No?” Carly sounded interested. “I can’t wait to hear this!” “No,” Shalom repeated. “What was it…boring, or something? Has old Nick finally worn out his welcome?” “It was…something,” Shalom hedged. “I don’t know exactly what. It was just…there. Just happened, and there was no sense of…you know what I’m trying to say?” “Absolutely.” Carly was sounding brighter and brighter. “You’re saying you had a Number 195
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Seven.” “Sex with an old flame?” Automatically, even though they were on the phone and Carly couldn’t possibly see it, Shalom shook her head. “I don’t…” “Trust me, Shal. The tone of your voice says he’s just moved into the realm of old flames.” “But it wasn’t like that. Because later…” “And of course it’s a Number Nineteen too.” “Number Nineteen?” Shalom gave up. She just completely gave up, because there was never going to be any controlling this mess, never going to be any controlling Carly or putting brakes on her enthusiasm for a project that had long since lost any charms it might have held. Coveted snowflake necklace notwithstanding. “That’s sex where the female of the couple doesn’t have orgasm.” “Well, it sure started out that way,” Shalom agreed almost sarcastically. “When he threw me across his bed and just starting boffing at me.” “His bed?” Carly clucked her tongue a little. “That’s not too good, Shal.” “No? Well, where the hell did you and Scumbag do it?” “It’s Mitch. And a point well taken. But this deal with Nick. I suppose he just flopped you down in the old Missionary position and came at you like a bull in heat?” Shalom couldn’t help herself. She had to smile at Carly’s thoroughly accurate assessment of what 196
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had happened in Nick’s apartment. “It was awful, Carly. Just nothing to it. Nothing sexy, or…at least not then, there wasn’t.” “So, you scored a grand and awesomely impressive total of two points for the night. Two for you, four for me. Unless you have something else to add.” “I do,” Shalom choked out, only to find it impossible to say anything else. “I’m waiting,” Carly said after a suitable pause. “Oh, Carly.” “My God. That doesn’t sound good.” “I’ve got to tell Nick about the challenge. I’ve got to…” “You absolutely cannot do that, Shal. Not now and not ever.” “I’ve got to. I…” “No! Listen to me! I’m telling you that would be the stupidest, the most moronic, the…the…” Carly floundered for a minute, spluttering wordlessly, making no sense at all in her frantic and disjointed attempts to make sense in a way she’d never really made any kind of sense before. “That would ruin everything!” she finished at last, sounding like that wasn’t what she’d wanted to say, wasn’t even half or a quarter of what she’d wanted and needed to say. “I just can’t go on like this. I…” Stopping, Shalom drew in a deep and completely unsatisfying breath. And closed her eyes. “Carly, I 197
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can’t keep doing this to him because I think I’m starting to care for him.” “Care?” For some reason, Carly didn’t sound as suspicious as Shalom expected her to sound. She didn’t sound nearly as gleeful or nearly as gloating. And that definitely and inarguably was not a good thing. “I’m…oh, Carly. I think I love him.” There was a moment of silence at the other end of the phone. Not exactly shocked silence, not completely anyway. And when Carly spoke again, her voice confirmed shock was the very least part of that silence. “Then you absolutely, positively cannot tell him about our challenge,” she declared, her voice firmer and more sure of itself than Shalom had ever heard it. And that was saying something. That was really, really, really saying something. “I just don’t think I can go on like this,” she said anyway, ignoring Carly’s protest. “Listen to me, Shal. I’m the Queen of Bad Ideas. You know I am. I can see a bad idea from a mile away. And I’m telling you right here and right now that this is a bad idea. This is a really, really, really, really, really, really bad idea, and if you want my opinion…” “I just feel so guilty. For lying to him all this time. For making him think…” “Feel anything you want. Let him think anything you want. But I’m warning you. Do not 198
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tell him about this.” “And start our relationship out on a lie?” Shalom heard the note of disbelief in her own tone, and she congratulated herself for it. It was reassuring to know she still could feel disbelief, guilt, and the kind of shame that was welling up inside her right now. The kind of shame that was going to eat her alive for sure if she didn’t… “Your Nick is a man,” Carly advised, and Shalom had no problem with at least that part of what she was saying. “And take it from me. Men do not understand things like this. Men are sensitive, self-conscious, fragile creatures who need…” “I thought men always said those things about women?” Carly made an impatient sound. “Men don’t know what they’re doing. Men think with their balls. And nothing else.” “I’m going to call him, Carly. I have to call him.” “Listen to me, Shalom.” Shalom waited, not very patiently. She was itching to get off the phone. Itching to finish this call and make the other one, the one she’d been dreading. To Nick. Itching to make it before she lost all the nerve she’d just found, before she wound up doing nothing at all. Nothing until the whole thing exploded in her face, as it inevitably would. As it inevitably had to. 199
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“Are you listening?” “Yes, Carly.” Now Shalom only sounded tired. Even to herself. Tired and almost defeated. “Do not call Nick. Do not ever give him so much as a hint about what’s been going on here, or you will be sorry. I guarantee it.” “I have to.” Shalom sounded even more miserable. Even more wrung out and worn down, if such a thing was possible. “I’m telling you, Shal. You will be sorry.”
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CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“Y
ou did what?” For a minute Nick’s head rang. It spun, Throbbed. Very suddenly ached all the way through, as violently as if he’d been shot straight through the brain in a way that hadn’t managed to kill but had managed very effectively to touch each and every one of his pain centers. “I’m so sorry.” Shalom really did sound sorry. But he was still reeling. Was still trying to pull himself together after the shocking revelation that she had…had…a revelation made on work time, no less, when he couldn’t do any of the things he wanted to do because people were nearby and people would hear. People would start to talk, and maybe his boss would get involved. Maybe his boss would… He wanted to shout. Wanted to cuss about ten blue streaks and then cuss another ten. Wanted to slam the receiver down. To throw 201
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the phone across the room and watch it smash against the wall. Wanted the satisfaction of seeing the damned, devil-spawned thing shatter to bits the way his heart had just shattered, into the tiniest little smithereens imaginable. He wanted to cry. Somehow, that last one would be the worst of all. The most unthinkable and unacceptable of all. To cry in the middle of the office. In the middle of the workday. In the middle of the massed crowd of his co-workers who would be shocked, but who would whisper all the same. Who would tell stories that would only grow and grow until they reached the proportions of some enormous scandal. Until they… Nick was sure Shalom had planned it this way. He was sure she’d waited until the middle of the workday…until lunch was finished and he’d gone beyond deeply involved in what he was doing, until the end of the day was in sight and he’d actually begun to relax a little, wondering if he’d see her tonight. Wondering if they would… Oh, she’d planned it all right. The little witch. Knowing he couldn’t shout, or rage, or throw things, she’d purposely waited until just this moment to call him and tell him… “I don’t believe you would do such a thing,” he declared, his voice tight and low with barely suppressed anger that frightened even him. “I s…said I was sorry.” Shalom sounded like 202
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she was about to cry. But he wasn’t going to fall for that old trick. Wasn’t going to fall for any more of her goddamned tricks, no matter how convincing she might sound. No matter how she might pour on the waterworks, thinking she could break through to his heart that way. “I don’t believe you could do such a thing, Shalom.” And that was the heart of it, right there. That was the crux of the whole matter. He didn’t believe it. Didn’t want to believe it. Because she’d already gotten through to his heart. She’d gotten through a long time ago, and there was nothing at all he could do to keep her out now. Nothing at all he could do to stop or even slow down the long and deadly death-spiral his heart was doing at the news he’d been played for a sucker and an A-number-one, first class fool. There was nothing he could do about any of it. Because he loved her. Loved her, dammit, and… “I never meant to hurt you,” she murmured, still too near tears. Still perilously, for both of them, near tears. “What else did you think you were going to do, Shalom? Or did you even think at all?” “It was supposed to be a lark. My friend Carly said it was going to be a lark, and…” “Your friend Carly needs to spend some quality time at the business end of a bull whip.” 203
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Somehow, judging by Shalom’s moment of silence and the slight hum of agreement that seemed to transmit itself through the phone, Nick thought this wasn’t the first time Shalom had heard such an idea expressed in some form or other. He thought it wasn’t the first time this Carly person, snarling and raging harpy that she had to be, had dragged his Shalom along by the roots of her shining, gleaming, copper-penny head of hair, straight into trouble she couldn’t easily find her way out of. And there he went again, dammit. His Shalom? Now he wanted to kick something. And almost did. He almost sent the metal garbage can next to his desk flying, clanging and banging fit to wake the dead and startle his lab-rat co-workers straight out of their nerd’s life apathy. She’d never been his Shalom in the first place! At least, she hadn’t been if all her babble about e-mail jokes and lists and challenges was any indication. Which he had to believe it was, because she really did sound distraught. Really did sound devastated. So apologetic and so ashamed of herself that it was almost more than he could do to harden his mind against her pleas and keep it that way. Still, it was better his mind be hard than… And on the thought, he was. It was. On the thought, his dick stood straight up and 204
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protested this couldn’t be the end, he couldn’t let it be the end. His dick protested, remembering the warm softness of her and the way she’d… “Why?” he asked, not quite ready to give in but not as ready to not give in, either. “Can you just tell me why you thought you had the right to treat me this way? Why you thought I didn’t have any feelings and wouldn’t be hurt by this?” “I’m sorry.” “You said that before. Now tell me, Shalom. What the hell was in this for you…” “I s…saw you in the parking garage that afternoon, and I didn’t m…mean to…I didn’t. But Carly did something to my car. Her dad was a mechanic, and she knows all about that kind of stuff. She did something so that it wouldn’t start, and then she left a copy of the e-mail taped to my door handle. And then there you were, and you were so handsome and so kind. You were so…” Handsome? Kind? Nick hadn’t thought of himself in either way before. And his heart melted a little more at the thought that she had. At the thought that the most beautiful and desirable woman he’d ever seen had found even a little bit of those same things in him, when he’d always… And that was just one more place he wasn’t going to go. Not if he had one single, goddamned thing to 205
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say about it. “You still haven’t told me what’s in this for you. If you win this disgusting challenge.” The silence on the phone line was explosive. Beyond explosive. The silence was the most deadly thing he’d heard in his life. Not that he’d heard all that many deadly things. But if he had, this one would rank right up there among the deadliest of them. “The snowflake necklace,” Shalom said at last, in a very tiny, very shamefaced and agonized murmur. “A necklace?” Thundering that last word, Nick almost hung up. He thought he’d actually been starting to make a move to hang up, been starting to contract the muscles in his arm in preparation for sweeping the receiver down and away from his ear. But then Shalom spoke again and something in her voice made him stop. Something in its undertone made him want to hear more…want to hear the rest of it, even though he didn’t want to hear any part of it at all. “You haven’t seen the necklace,” she said, sounding even more ashamed of herself. At the same time that the little something sparkled at the back of her tone as if to entice him. As if to remind him he’d already been enticed, already been captured, already rendered completely powerless to resist the devil’s charm she exerted over him and upon him. “It’s magnificent. It’s…Carly and I 206
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both wanted it, but Carly bought it before I could get to it, and it’s…I don’t know. It’s been a sore spot between us for a couple of years. So this just seemed like a way to resolve that whole issue, a way to…” “Let me get this straight.” Nick’s voice gave nothing. He wouldn’t allow it to give, wouldn’t allow it to offer a single, goddamned thing even if all the rest of him…all the inside of him…had long since softened to a pile of mush that could no more resist her than a baby could resist candy. “You used me. You made a fool out of me…” “It was never my intention to make a fool out of anybody. Nick.” “Well, that’s another topic for discussion. Some other time. But for right now, let’s just agree that you used me and made me feel like a complete and perfect ass.” “Agreed.” Her voice was very small now. Nick could just picture her, sitting behind her desk or maybe perched on a countertop in her company’s break room with her shoulders bent and hunched and her eyes lowered, studying the floor as if that was the only thing she deserved to study. “And you did it all for a necklace.” “Yes.” Her tone held. It deepened even more, to the most abject and pitiable cry for mercy he’d ever heard. A cry, God help him, that he was as powerless to resist as he was powerless to resist any other 207
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single thing about her. “And now you say you’re sorry, and you want me to just…” “Not want, Nick. I wouldn’t blame you if you never spoke to me again. I wouldn’t blame you if you spat on my memory, my picture, my…” “I don’t have a picture of you.” Now, why in the hell did that realization send such a sharp-hot pang of suffering through him? Why in the hell did he think this little witch deserved a sharp-hot pang of anything other than the flat of a hand across her pert and conniving little ass-end? “I just wanted to tell you I’m sorry,” she said, obviously on the verge of admitting defeat and admitting failure. “I couldn’t let it go on any longer. I couldn’t…” She choked a little, and for a longer than long moment Nick thought the tears were about to start and the end was about to come. But somehow she got hold of herself. Somehow she managed to calm herself enough that when she spoke again her voice was flat and even, betraying nothing of what he knew she had to be going through. “I couldn’t keep on living the lie,” she whispered. “I couldn’t keep on doing it to you, because I…oh, Nick. Because I started to like you. An awful lot. I started to grow close to you, and I didn’t want to do that to you any more.” She had? Grown close to him? In the same way he’d found himself growing steadily, unstoppably closer to her? 208
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Against his firm and deliberate command, Nick’s heart leaped with something that could only be joy. She’d started to like him? The way he’d started to like her? And he could just cut the crap about that, too. Like, hell. He’d started to love her. There it was. Out in the open. All the way out. And she was saying something again. Something else unbelievable, something that made him reconsider his first notion that she was talking to him from some kind of office lunch room. “I’ve been feeling so guilty,” she murmured, her voice no more than a thready, throaty whisper. “For all of it. Every time you…and then yesterday. When we were in your bed together, and we were…” Say it, his mind urged, lost on an intoxicating wave of sheer, animal desire that ran through his too-hard and altogether too-distended-for-currentconditions dick. No! Don’t say it! Don’t even hint it! But of course she did. “When we were fucking,” she breathed. “The way I’ve never fucked before, the way I’m so afraid I’m never going to fuck or be fucked again. Because if you go, if you stay mad at me and never speak to me again…” Outrageous! Unacceptable! Surreptitiously, he cast a glance around the 209
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office. At the moment, no one was paying him the slightest bit of attention. No one was anywhere hear him, and he could, if he dared…but he didn’t. Couldn’t force himself, even though everyone’s back was turned and no one would ever be the wiser, to lower a hand to his lap and cradle the swollen, suffering length of himself. “If you never fuck me again,” she declared, her voice gaining enough volume and enough strength that he knew she wasn’t in any kind of office. Hoped she wasn’t in any place more public than her own living room. Or bedroom. “Where are you?” he breathed, his voice raspy and unsteady with the effort to avoid stroking himself. “In bed.” “You…” He gagged a little on the word. “I played hooky today,” she replied without waiting for him to gather himself together enough to even think about finishing. “I was feeling so bad, Nick. For treating you the way I did. For…” And that was all it took. That was enough to remind him he should be feeling angry. Should be feeling righteously angry, righteously put-upon, and very thoroughly righteously outraged by the shabbiness of what she’d done and the nerve she had, thinking he’d ever be able to…ever want to…just forgive her as if none of it had ever happened. 210
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“You bamboozled me,” he said, his tone hardening again. At least as much as his dick, goddamned traitor and turncoat that it was, remained hard and unyielding. “What?” “You heard me. You bamboozled me. That means you concealed your true motives, and you…” “I know what it means, Nick. But you really don’t believe I would ever set out to deliberately…?” “Before God, Shalom. I don’t know what the hell to think about you any more. I thought I knew you. Thought I trusted you because you were to be trusted. Because you were the real thing, you were so open and honest and warm. Because I really did think I saw the light of friendship in your eyes whenever you looked at me and I looked at you. I thought I knew you, but now I see that I was mistaken.” “All of that was true, Nick.” She sounded close to tears again, but he really wasn’t going to fall for that old caper. He wasn’t going to be bamboozled again. Ever. “Please tell me you know it’s true.” “I can’t tell you anything, Shalom.” He was getting ready to hang up now. Getting ready to hang up for real this time. He could feel the muscles in his arm and shoulder tense. Could feel the sweat break out in the palm of the hand 211
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that clutched the phone receiver too tight…way too tight. Could feel the desire to move gathering momentum inside him. Could feel the growing pressure of his impending and almost certainly inevitable loss down there where impending and almost certain losses hurt the most. In his balls. His poor, wounded, abused and mistreated balls that had never done one single goddamned thing to hurt anybody, but which had been used as badly as the rest of him had been used. Which had maybe, probably, been used one hell of a lot more, in one hell of a lot worse way than all the rest of him. “You bamboozled me,” he declared again, a new and dark-shaded fury rising up inside him at the very idea…a fury like none he’d felt before and none he’d even guessed he might be capable of. “That’s all there is to it. You used me like some kind of foolish boy-toy created specifically and only for your perverted pleasure.” “Perverted? Oh, Nick, surely you don’t think anything we did was…” “Perverted,” he insisted, knowing she was more right than he was, but not caring to admit it. Not wanting to admit it, or anything else to her. “You lied, Shalom. You made a fool of me, and…goddamn it all to hell, anyway. I don’t even know why I’m talking to you or why I think you deserve another word from me.” And with that, he hung up. 212
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He slammed the receiver into the cradle with a lot more force than he’d intended but a hell of a lot less force than he wanted. He slammed it down, causing several of his co-workers to look up in surprise or annoyance and then, unable to stop himself, he slumped forward over his desk. Folding his arms on its top, folding them atop the myriad confusion of papers and charts and reference materials strewn all over its top, he slumped forward and dropped his forehead onto them with a barely murmured “shit,” that he knew couldn’t be heard anywhere else in the room. “Shit,” he said again, a little louder, as he heard a faint rustling of sound and felt a shadow drop like lead across his desk and across him. “You all right, man?” It was Leroy, the guy who sat in the corner facing him. Leroy, the office gossip, who’d no doubt just love to put this one on the grapevine and milk it for all it was worth, embellishing it with a few little details that had no reality except inside his fertile and deviously criminal imagination. “I’m just dandy,” Nick replied. Feeling the loss of Shalom more than he’d expected, feeling pangs of it that burst deep inside him to wither his balls and remove all trace of starch from his failing dick, he sat up straight, marveling at the vista of long and lonely years that yawned ahead of 213
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him…years he knew he would spend searching for something that was even half as good as what he’d so foolishly imagined he’d found with her. Marveling and, catching Leroy’s gaze still on him and the quirky little smirk already forming on the other man’s face, wondering if maybe it wasn’t already too late. Wondering if the whole office wasn’t about to be treated to a tale that would make his bamboozlement at the hands of Shalom Wilson a matter of public record. A matter of public hilarity, for years and years and years to come.
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CHAPTER FIFTEEN
D
evastated even before the phone dropped all the way into its cradle, Shalom wondered if this would count as Carly’s infamous Number Seventeen. Phone sex. Things had really seemed promising there for a minute. Nick had really seemed on the verge of forgiving her anything and everything. He’d seemed more saddened than angered, more confused than ready to tell her to go to hell while showing her the back of his hand. He’d seemed ready to go on, especially after she’d apologized so repeatedly and as profusely as she knew how. He’d seemed even, for all too short and all too fleeting a time, to listen to her explanation and believe it. And that was when things had started to heat up a little. That was when things had begun to turn promising, though, of course, in the end the 215
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promise had been even more fleeting and one hell of a lot more pathetically tragic than his momentary lapse into belief and understanding. They’d talked about fucking. Or rather, she’d talked, never expecting him to answer. Because he was in his office, after all. He was in a place where people…except possibly Carly…just didn’t talk about things like fucking and screwing and all the ways it was possible to do it. Not if they wanted to be invited back tomorrow or the day after that, they didn’t. So it had actually been her talking about fucking, her letting him know in every way she could, short of outright screaming it into his ear, that she’d liked fucking him in the past and wanted to fuck him some more. Wanted to fuck him again and again and again. She’d talked about it and he’d listened. He’d seemed more than willing to listen. And unless she’d been seriously, grievously mistaken, he’d been entertaining some similar thoughts of his own. Until something had gone wrong. Until she’d said something or hinted something that had made him angry all over again. Something that had made him more than angry. Something that had disgusted him. With her. With them. With all of it. Until she’d said something or done something that had made him so disgusted he never wanted to see her again. 216
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Never. That much of Nick’s message, at least, had been clear. Crystal clear. He never wanted to see her again. And it was all her fault. Wearily, more wearily than she could ever remember doing anything, Shalom reached for the phone. More wearily still, she dialed, then waited through three rings, then five, then seven on Carly’s office extension. She was just about to hang up, deciding she only deserved to be completely deserted by every person who’d ever been important in her life, when Carly answered. “Forsell Mortgage And Title. Carly Stevens speaking. How may I help you?” “Carly, it’s me.” “Oh.” Carly was silent for a moment. A long, long moment that threatened to get even longer…to get so long Shalom would chicken out and hang up, and then what would she do? Then where would she turn for the consolation she didn’t at all deserve but needed so desperately the need was just about to kill her? “You told him,” Carly said at last, and she wasn’t asking. She was telling. “How did you know?” “I can hear it in your voice. You told him everything. And it didn’t go well.” “No. It didn’t.” “Shal…” For a minute, another exasperated and 217
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silent minute during which Shalom quit breathing because it sounded like Carly had quit breathing on the other end of the line, the words hung in the distance between them. I told you so. I told you not to tell him. I told you he wouldn’t understand…he wouldn’t be able to understand. Carly didn’t actually say them, but she might as well have. They rang out that loud and that perfectly intelligible inside Shalom’s thunderously aching head. And Shalom found herself wishing Carly would say them. Because anything, even that dreaded but all too entirely true ‘I told you so’ would be better than this…better than silence laden with…nothing. Nothing at all. Then Carly sighed. It was a heavy sound, one filled with every bit as much grief and anguish as Shalom felt in her heart right about then. But wasn’t that why Carly was her friend? Wasn’t that why Carly had always been her friend, for as long as she could remember? Because Carly shared in her hurts and never told her she was stupid even when they both knew she’d been stupid? Like now. “Oh, Shal,” Carly said, and her voice was heavy with the shared sorrow. “What can I say? What can I do?” “I can’t…don’t…” Sighing now herself, Shalom fell back across the bed in the small upstairs room that seemed nothing short of dreary and 218
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unbearable now that she had absolutely nothing in the world to live for and massaged the tender, aching flesh between her eyes with a fingertip. “Do you want me to come over?” “Now?” Shalom sighed. “Carly, it’s the middle of the day. You’re at work, and…” Carly made a small, pooh-poohing sound. “I’ll tell Matthew I’m sick. I’ll tell him I’ve got female problems, and he’ll never say boo to a goose. Men are afraid of female problems, Shal. He’ll probably be the first to escort me to the door if I clutch at my stomach and moan something pathetic about cramps. About dying.” “I can’t let you do that, Carly.” She made that sound again. Pooh-poohing every word Shalom had said. “I don’t know why not. What else are friends for?” What else indeed? Shalom shuddered. Carly was the best of them. Truly, she was. The very best of friends. But… “I can’t let you do that,” she murmured. “Didn’t Matthew warn you on your last review that you were taking too many days off? Didn’t he say he’d put you on probation if you kept it up?” “Well, okay.” Carly sounded sullen. Petulant, almost, and like she was still considering taking the rest of the day off, if only to inconvenience Matthew who really was just a little bit of a pill when it came to something as simple as using the 219
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sick time they earned. “He did say that. But you’re more important, Shal. You’re more important than anything, and if you need me, all you have to do is say the word. I’ll be there so fast your head will spin. I’ll be there so fast…” “Just tell me one thing, Carly.” “Anything. Just ask.” “Do I get any points for this?” Carly made another small sound, and this time it really was an exasperated one. “I’m afraid not. There’s nothing on the list about getting points for doing something that’s just criminally, hopelessly stupid.” There. She’d said it. And it hurt worse than Shalom had ever believed it would. Carly had told her she was stupid. Carly, her best friend for as long as she could remember, thought she was stupid. So stupid that she got no points. So stupid she’d never in all her life get another point. For anything. And who the hell cared about points, anyway? Who the hell gave one rat’s rosy rump about some goddamned points that meant nothing in the grand scheme of things? Points that meant nothing except trouble and deceit. Nothing except the kind of heartbreak Shalom was terribly afraid she was never going to survive now that she’d brought it down upon herself. “I don’t think he wants to see me any more, 220
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Carly.” Again, Carly said nothing, and again Shalom thought she could read Carly’s thoughts. Why would he want to? her imaginary voice rang inside Shalom’s head. Why on earth would any man want to see you again after you pulled something like that and then had the unmitigated idiocy to admit it? But once again, twice as mercifully this time, Carly didn’t say anything of the kind. “We have to figure out what to do about this,” she said instead. “Do?” Once again Shalom shook her head, then dragged the trembling fingers of her free hand back through her rumpled and uncombed hair. “I don’t see that there is anything we can do.” “We’ll think of something. I promise.” “Carly, isn’t that how I got myself into this mess in the first place? By following one of your cockeyed schemes?” Carly was silent for a minute. A long, long minute, the longest of the long, during which Shalom decided she’d offended her and was just about to open her mouth. Just about to say something else, when Carly spoke again in an uncharacteristically meek and submissive voice. “He was really mad, huh?” Shalom sighed. “I think so. I think he was livid with rage, but I think he was too much of a gentleman to show it. I don’t think shouting and screaming are exactly his style, but I heard 221
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something in his voice…oh, Carly. He sounded so cold. So…outraged. I just don’t think there’s anything more I can do, or you can do, or anybody can do.” “Maybe if you just wait he’ll come to his senses and…” “That’s the problem. He has come to his senses. He’s come to them in a big way, and he’s never coming back to me.” He’s never coming back. The words rang hollow and harsh inside Shalom’s head, and her shoulders sagged beneath the weight of truth in each and every one of them. Nick was gone. Nick was never going to come back to her. He was lost forever, gone forever, and she had no idea how she was going to live with the loss. With the emptiness he’d left behind when he’d pulled out. With the knowledge that she’d had something once, something incredibly beautiful and wondrously special. Something she’d lost out of her own stubborn stupidity, her willingness to just follow blindly wherever someone stronger led, her own failure to care a lick about the other person’s feelings. “He’s never coming back,” she repeated dully, and another of those long and tense, long and leaden silences fell on the phone line. “God, Shal,” Carly said at last, her voice losing even more of its upbeat and sometimes 222
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maddening effervescence. “I hate to hear you sounding like this.” “How do I sound?” Another silence. Not quite as long this time, but still as weighted down with hopelessness. “Like you think you can’t go on.” “I can’t.” “Like you think the world has come to an end.” “It has.” “Shal, you sound like you love him. You sound like you’ve fallen in love with this Nick person, like there will never be another.” As, of course, Shalom had. As, just naturally, she was afraid to admit even now, when Carly herself had opened the door on the possibility and given some hint, a small one but a definite one, that maybe falling in love wasn’t such a bad thing. Maybe falling in love wasn’t such a stupid idea, or such an unacceptable one after all. “You do know,” Carly murmured, sounding like she was picking her words very, very carefully now. “That telling Nick what you were up to might not have been the smartest move you’ve made in your life?” Shalom shuddered. Not the smartest move? Now, that was an understatement! “What about the snowflake necklace?” Carly asked at length. “What about it?” 223
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“God, Shal. You’ve wanted that necklace for as long as…well, I don’t remember exactly how long. You’ve wanted it ever since the minute we both wanted it, and you realized you’d left your credit card at home in the dresser drawer. You’ve wanted that silly thing ever since I pulled the really, really shabby trick of buying it right out from under you when I knew you were planning to come back and get it as soon as you could.” Shalom brightened. A little. A very, very little. “I’m glad to hear you admit that, anyway. I’m glad to know you’ve finally seen the truth of that, I’m so glad you’ve finally come to understand…” “I saw the truth all along, Shal.” Carly sounded excruciatingly tired now, too. “I was a horrible person…a horrible friend. I’ve been a horrible friend all along, forcing you to do things you never wanted to do. Things that weren’t in your character and made you uncomfortable.” “You haven’t been horrible at all. And you’ve never forced me into anything. I think you were my excuse for doing all the things I’ve always wanted to do but never would have had the gumption to do on my own.” “So. I’m forgiven?” “There was never anything to forgive you for, Carly.” “You’re more generous than I am.” Shalom sighed. “No, I’m not.” “Then what about the necklace?” 224
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“Keep it. I don’t want it any more. Every time I see it, it will only remind me of…” Nick. She couldn’t even say his name now. Could barely allow herself to think it, and she wondered if that would ever change. Wondered if she would ever be able to look back on those blissful moments of love and laughter and music in the park with a smile at the memories. Wondered if she would ever be able to laugh again the way she’d laughed, for such a brief and fleeting time, when she’d been with him. When she’d thought she had a chance at something permanent with him. “You were doing so good on the challenge, too,” Carly mourned. “Did you know that, Shal?” “Have you been listening to me? Have you heard one single, God-blasted word I’ve had to say?” “Sure I have. I’ve been…” “The bet doesn’t matter!” Shalom wanted to scream it. And judging by the moment of shocked silence from Carly, she thought she just might have. Or at least she might have shouted the words a whole lot more forcefully than she’d ever intended to shout anything. “It just doesn’t matter,” she said again, much more quietly but no less forcefully. “It just doesn’t, Carly. That’s all. Because nobody’s going to win in this. Nobody can win, and I…well, I’ve had it. I’m done. For 225
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now…and forever.” “Would it help if I told you we’re neck and neck in this thing? Would it help if you knew we’re holding dead even with sixteen points apiece?” Sixteen? Something inside Shalom perked up again, for another very brief but very telling instant. She hadn’t realized it was that many. Hadn’t realized it was even possible for her to rack up that many points in this kind of experiment. Not when she’d always been a little backward about sex. A little repressed and introverted. And more than a little shy about the act itself or discussing the act afterward, even with someone who’d been there and been participating in the same experiment. “Sixteen,” she mused slowly, not quite able to push the thought to where it belonged. The back of her mind. The far, far and dusty, never-to-be-seen-again back. “Sixteen,” Carly confirmed. “So, what do you think? Are we still on? Is the bet still…” Shalom shuddered. Still on? She had to be kidding! “What’s the use?” she asked, sinking back into her miasma of depression and self-disgust. “You could do what I did. Find yourself another man…there are plenty of them out there, 226
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Shal. Plenty who’d jump at a chance like this.” “Thank you.” Shalom shuddered again. Shuddered so badly that for a moment she was unable to speak, or even to make a sound that would express the sudden wave of revulsion that swept over her. “But no thanks. Starting over again, starting with a different man every night, is not for me.” “It doesn’t have to be a different man every night. You could just find a different man. Just start over the way you started before.” The shudders were back. Really, really back, in full force this time. “No,” Shalom said, putting her foot down at last, her tone indicating she’d put it down in the way she sometimes…oftentimes…had to put it down whenver Carly was involved. And then Carly groaned. Her voice dropped to a lower key, a lower register, and turned urgent. “Listen, Shal. I gotta go. Matthew’s closing in on me, and he’s got a look in his eye…he looks like he’s ready to fire me if he thinks I’m fooling around on the job…” “Which you are.” “So I’ll call you later, okay? I’ll call you tonight, and we’ll talk some more about this. About all of this.” Shalom remained silent. “Okay?” Carly demanded, her tone of urgency growing. 227
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“Fine.” Shalom started to put the receiver down, but the sound of Carly’s voice called her back one last time. “And don’t do anything stupid,” Carly said. “Okay?” Shrugging, Shalom dropped the receiver back into the cradle. Don’t do anything stupid? Hadn’t she done everything stupid already? Everything she could possibly do that was stupid enough to louse up the entire, godforsaken world? The answer was yes. And she just wanted to die.
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CHAPTER SIXTEEN
N
ick had to leave early. He had to feign a sudden headache… one of the killing migraines everyone in his office knew he suffered from time to time, usually after a long and hard night of partying with his more outgoing co-workers at one of the local clubs or another. He had to gather his shit together, stuffing his papers and the remains of his lunch into his briefcase with hands that honestly, genuinely did shake. Had to get the hell out of there. He felt sure his face was white. Parched white and pinched, just as if this was a real migraine. He knew it was white when his boss asked if he was okay to drive home by himself, and he had the presence of mind to say he’d leave his car and take a bus. Of course there was no truth in that last part. Not a bit of it. Because he wasn’t going to mess with busses at a time like this. Wasn’t going to wade into the sometimes bizarre convolutions of 229
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Port Authority Transit’s idea of a schedule, Anyway, he wasn’t going to abandon the Jag in a downtown parking garage even if it wasn’t his. Even if he’d bought the insurance and couldn’t be out too much cash if something did happen to it while it sat there unattended for God only knew how long. He wasn’t going to do any of it because he didn’t have a migraine and he did need to talk to Shalom Wilson. He needed to talk to her right now. Needed to confront her face to face, without the anonymity of phone lines and distance to mute the things he had to say. The things…some of them harsh and all of them more honest than a lying and scheming little witch like her had ever deserved…he was going to say the instant he found her. More angry by the minute, more angry by the mile, driving recklessly and not giving a hoot in hell if the entire Pennsylvania State Police force materialized in their unnerving way and came down on him with the full force of every law they could pull out of their bottomless Smokey-TheBear hats, he had an idea he was going to find Shalom at home. Wasn’t that what slackers like her…liars and cheats like her…usually did? Always did? Didn’t they make it a habit to call in sick at every little excuse? Or at no excuse at all? And then he was at her door. 230
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Then he was sitting in the street just across from her duplex, staring at the blank and curtained window at the center of her door, wondering what in the hell he was doing here, anyway. He’d already said everything that needed to be said. Already told her he had no further use for her. Already abandoned the contact lenses she’d convinced him to wear again and gone back to the safety of heavy-rimmed nerd glasses. He’d already returned to himself, the way he’d always been himself, and he wouldn’t be making that mistake again. Wouldn’t ever be dumb enough or gullible enough to… And just who was he trying to kid, anyway? The plain and simple fact…the one that had haunted his every minute since he’d written her off in his fit of outrage…was that he wanted her. More than he’d planned to want a woman in his life. He wanted her with all the infatuated, physical yearning of an alcoholic coming face to face with a full bottle after five years of sobriety. He wanted her in a way that was never going to go away, just like that addiction to alcohol. A way he was going to have to fight from now on, through every waking and conscious second of his life. He didn’t know a hell of a lot about how alcoholism worked…didn’t know squat about how it worked…but if what he suspected was true, then he was probably going to have to fight his want for Shalom and his need for her even 231
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through his sleeping hours. Because she’d become a craving rooted deep inside him. She’d become a tormenting itch that could never be scratched. An itch from which there could never be relief or release. She was a part of him now, in some way he didn’t want to examine but which he had to accept. Because it was either accept or die. And he wasn’t ready for death yet. Slowly, he got out of the car. He leaned back against it for a few seconds, still intent upon her front door and the curtain that hadn’t moved so much as a fraction of an inch in all the time he’d been watching it. What if she wasn’t here? What if he’d been wrong about her, wrong about everything, and this had all been a wild goose chase? What if… He advanced slowly, not certain he could ring the bell even if his courage lasted long enough to carry him all the way to the door. And then he was there. Then he was standing frozen in place, his arm raised halfway, the tiny black circle of the doorbell button seeming to taunt him with its nearness to his finger that wasn’t nearness at all as much as an unbridgeable chasm between what he’d said to her the last time they’d talked and what he wanted to say to her now. That he was sorry. That he was so terribly, terribly sorry and was 232
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going to die on the spot if she didn’t take him back. If she didn’t give him another chance. He stood motionless for the longest time, a statue with its finger poised eternally just inches away from the button that was his only hope, unable to reach it and ready to die from that, too. And then finally, just when he at last found the will to move his hand closer to the button, the front door flew open without warning. Snapped too rapidly out of his trance, Nick stumbled backward toward the stairs, gaping at the woman who stood before him. Gaping at a rumpled and untidy Shalom, who looked like she’d just been roused out of deepest and most tortured sleep. A Shalom who looked like she’d been crying her heart out. “You,” she murmured, her face an unreadable blank. “Can I come in?” She didn’t move. Didn’t make a single inviting gesture. “Why?” “Because we need to talk.” “I thought we’d said it all already, Nick. I thought you’d said it all. And everything you said was crystal clear to me. That you’re done with me. That you’re disgusted with me, and…” “I wish that wasn’t true, Shalom.” Her eyebrows went up, and for a minute she looked like she was about to slam the door in his face. 233
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Which was all he deserved, anyway, wasn’t it? “You do?” she demanded. “Wish I wasn’t disgusting and you weren’t done with me?” “No.” God, how stupid could he be? Saying something like that to her, when he should have known she was overwrought and would misunderstand. When he should have known in every way it was possible to know that she’d take it all the wrong way. “I meant I wish it wasn’t true that I’d said those things.” “So you’re telling me you didn’t mean them after all?” Suddenly uncomfortable, suddenly experiencing the creepy and flesh-crawling sensation that they weren’t alone on her front porch even if no one else seemed to be within sight, Nick glanced around. “Can I come inside?” he asked again, returning what he hoped was a pleading gaze to Shalom. “I really feel like the whole world is watching, trying to hear every word we say.” At last she stood aside. At last she allowed him to step into her small and narrow front hall, busy with flower-printed wallpaper and an antique and way-too-curlicued-for-his-taste hatrack next to the front door. “That would be my neighbor across the street,” she said, turning toward her equally small but much less antique-infested living room. “Mrs. Slawinski. She’s retired, and she doesn’t miss 234
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much that goes on in this street.” Unbelievably, wondrously, Shalom chuckled. “I suppose she’s how you knew I was lurking around your door?” he asked, looking around for someplace to put his briefcase and wondering why in the hell he’d brought it along from the car, anyway. Shalom chuckled again, and it was such a welcome sound. Such a welcome expression as the hardness lifted from her face and her features settled back into their lovely and slightly breathless look of wonders about to happen and mysteries about to be revealed. “She called me. Said there was a ‘suspicious character’…those are her words, mind you, not mine…hanging around in the street, watching my house. She offered to call the police. Was all hot to call the police, because there’s nothing in the world Mrs. Slawinski likes as much as seeing someone get arrested. But I looked out the window and saw your Jag, and I…” “It’s not mine.” Shalom’s brow wrinkled. “What?” “The Jag. It’s not mine. I rented it after my own car was totaled.” “Oh.” Her frown increased. Like she was wondering what the hell that had to do with anything. As what the hell did it have to do with anything? 235
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“So you looked out the window and you knew who it was,” he said, finally depositing his briefcase on the floor behind a potted plant that turned out to be silk instead of some jungle of exotic and fragrant tropical vegetation at all. “I did. And I knew it was you. I knew it wasn’t somebody wanting to do all the terribly horrible things Mrs. Slawinski suggested you might be about to do, not the least of which was to steal that ‘fancy-pants’ car and sell the parts for money to buy prostitutes and cocaine. Again, her words and not mine.” “Sounds like your Mrs. S has quite an imagination.” “She leads a rich and vivid fantasy life, that’s for sure.” “Like the one we were living a little while ago?” Perching on the arm of her cheap, modern sofa, Shalom tried to glare up at him. She tried, but all that came through was a heartrendingly forlorn look of lost confusion and regret. “Is that why you came here, Nick? To scream at me some more, and…” “I didn’t scream.” He didn’t think he’d screamed. “…revile me for doing something I knew was stupid, know was stupid, and wish I’d never let myself be bamboozled into doing?” “I never scream, Shalom.” “Because if you have, you couldn’t possibly say 236
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anything I haven’t already said to myself. You couldn’t possibly call me any names I haven’t called myself, or make me hate myself any more than I already do.” “That’s not why I came here!” Her eyebrows lifted again. Into a more arch expression, a more skeptical one that said she didn’t believe him. Not entirely, anyway, even though it was obvious she wanted very badly to believe. “Then why?” Nick looked down. At the floor. At his shoes. At anything below him. I came because I can’t live without you. Of course he couldn’t say that. Not yet. Maybe not ever. For certain not until he knew where she stood on the issue. Not until he knew how badly he’d hurt her and how receptive she might be to a fresh start, unencumbered by lies or trickeries, or any kind of bets involving jewelry. “I came because…” And where the hell was he supposed to go from here, anyway? Apology didn’t come easily to him…had never come easily to any of the stiff-necked, proud-Irish O’Haras. And it really didn’t come easily now, when he held the firm conviction that he’d done nothing at all for which he should be expected to apologize. But somebody had to say something. Somebody had to break the ice, and he guessed 237
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it had to be him. So he opened his mouth, hoping whatever came out wouldn’t only make a bad situation that much worse. But Shalom beat him to the punch. “We had something,” she began, sounding much more tentative than he’d ever heard her sound. “I thought we had something.” Nick cleared his throat. Shifted his shoulders a little and tried to hide his relief. “I thought so too.” “And then it just…ended.” “You betrayed me,” he replied, hating the sound of the word even if it did express exactly, succinctly, how he felt about all of it. Now it was her turn to look uncomfortable. “I know I did. And I’m sorry, Nick. I’m just as sorry as I can be, and I promise you I’ll never do it again. Not to another human being.” “So, let me get this straight. You are sorry for what you did. But not sorry you got caught doing it?” Her brow wrinkled again and he wanted her again. Just like that. And more than ever he wanted to put all of it behind him…behind them. Wanted to get on with what they’d had before. Get on with the warmth, the wonder, the feeling of utter safety and utter belonging that had filled him to overflowing every time they’d been together. He wanted her that much, that badly. And it was all he could do to not just reach for her. Not just drag her forward into an embrace from which 238
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he would never again release her and never again let her escape. But her answer was important. What she had to say was too important to let sex or the desire for sex get in the way just yet. “I never did get caught,” she murmured at last, her frown increasing until she looked so sweet, so lost and helpless that it really was all he could do to resist the pull she’d never stopped exerting on him. “If you remember, I admitted it all to you. I came right out and told you what I’d done and how I’d lied. I…” She was right. She had. And there was no more reason…not a single, goddamned one in the entire universe…why he should hold himself back. Why he should avoid impulse when it sent him hurtling forward without warning. Sent him hurtling headlong across the room, his arms already opened wide and his heart already striking up its old, familiar and too-nearly-lost-forever rhythm of aching, jerking, nerve-shattering need. There was no reason why he should not want her to come to him the way she did, rising from her perch on the sofa’s arm and hurtling herself just as hungrily forward to meet the circle of those anguished, waiting arms and fill them. The way they yearned to be filled. Shalom came into his arms, and when they 239
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closed around her she pressed her small and shaking body tight against his, lifting her grayeyed gaze to meet his with an invitation he couldn’t misread, an invitation he couldn’t possibly ignore or possibly resist. She wanted him to kiss her. And he did. His head tilted forward. His lips brushed against hers for the tiniest of moments before, his arms already tightening and hardening in instinctive reaction, he pressed his mouth even harder against hers. Before he lashed out with his tongue, stroking impatiently at the closed softness of the cherry-ripe and cherry-sweet lips he wanted to own, the mouth he wanted to conquer and consume. He stroked his tongue across her lips anything but gently, and in reply they opened. They allowed him to enter where he’d feared he’d never be welcome to enter again. And with that single, small motion, he was complete again. He’d come back again to the place where he’d always belonged, the place he never should have been fool enough to leave in the first place. He came back to her. Groaning softly, murmuring wordless things that had to be more invitations and more welcomes, Shalom twisted softly in his grip. Not in a way that said she wanted to pull away from him, but in a way that said she’d like to get inside 240
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him. Like to penetrate his clothing and his skin and join him, become one with him, become such an inextricable part of him that to separate again would indeed mean death. For both of them. She twisted softly. Gently. Sinuously. And her tongue was just as sinuous, just as mindlessly, mind-blowingly soft and pliant as the body that writhed harder now, communicating the full extent of the anguish she’d felt when he’d left her with its every swaying, shuddering motion against the hardness of his. He ached. The same way he’d been aching all along. Only more. He ached fatally, his cock enlarged and engorged but somehow numbed to almost nonimportance by the raging surge of pressurized need that had filled his balls at his first sight of her in so many hours, then had immediately filled them even more with the first, searing brush of his mouth against hers. He ached. Throbbed with the ache. Pounded with it, burned with it, cramped with it. Thinking there would never be any relief from an ache of this magnitude and this depth, Nick tried anyway. Tried, by rubbing the long and swollen length of a dick that felt like it had gone years and years without instead of mere hours and hours without. Tried to find for himself the release and relief his mind insisted, warned, could only come from Shalom. 241
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Because all relief and all release were entirely in her power. Exclusively in her power. Strictly in her power for now and, he thought with the very last, small particle of thought she’d left to him, for ever.
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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
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halom hadn’t expected to throw herself at him. She expected…wanted…to remain aloof and standoffish. To let him know that as badly as she’d behaved, as badly as she’d long since admitted she’d behaved, she’d been hurt, too. Maybe hurt worse than he’d been hurt. Because she’d been honest. She’d come clean when she’d known she had to, and what had she gotten from it? What had she gained? Accusations. Anger. Abandonment. Shalom had always heard that no good ever came of sex begun in a fit of rage. She didn’t know where she’d heard it. Maybe from her mother, though remembering her mother’s horrified and red-faced explanations of the facts of life when Shalom had been fifteen and had long since learned everything she needed to know from 243
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Carly and from her own experiences, she doubted her mother had ever said any such thing. Mention of the word sex just wasn’t in her mother’s makeup. So maybe it had been her Aunt Agnes, who’d been reputed to have been a prostitute in her youth and who certainly didn’t have any kind of inhibitions to speak of, who’d… And what was she thinking? Why was she thinking about her mother or long-dead Aunt Agnes, when she was in Nick’s arms? When they were so strong around her and she was just about to tumble down and down into the delight that was him. Into the eternal thrill that was him. He was kissing her, but not like he’d ever kissed her before. There was a new wildness in his kiss this time, a new potency, probably born of some shred of lingering anger at her and with her. But mostly, incredibly, it seemed he had reached an all-new depth of passion that transmitted itself from his hard and demanding lips into her softer and extremely more pliant and submissive ones. He was kissing her. Right in the middle of her living room, his hands already lifting, already beginning to explore the hidden territories beneath the oversized tee shirt she wore as a nightgown when no one was around to see…the same navy-blue tee shirt she hadn’t bothered to change out of this morning when she’d first realized she was in no shape and no mood to go to 244
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work. Nick was kissing her, and he was running his hands across her, across breasts and shoulders, across tingling flesh that covered the barely contained leaping of her stomach whenever…wherever…he touched. He was doing all of that to her and so much more. And as a result the world had begun to shift around her. It had begun to shift wildly, a little dangerously, yet delightfully at the same time. And dizzily. More than anything the world had become a whole dizzying series of out-of-focus meanderings as blood first rushed away from Shalom’s head and then immediately turned around and rushed right back, filling it with a fuzzy wooziness that threatened to send her sprawling across the floor. If Nick didn’t send her there first. “I can’t believe,” he murmured between kisses, seeming to at once forget whatever he’d been planning to say. Because his mouth closed over hers again. His tongue entered and made sizzling, steaming contact with hers again, and the heat it generated, the deep and steady sensation of warmth begun, warmth that would never again be stopped or interrupted, mixed with the confusion of an incredible nuclear accident just about to happen somewhere inside her, was enough to drive all but the most persistent thoughts from Shalom’s mind. “Nick.” She breathed his name. But that was all 245
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she could breathe. That was the only word she could remember in her extremity of anxiety that he wouldn’t begin soon enough. That he might remember he was supposed to be angry and not begin at all. It was all she could think to utter when the clouds of swirling and steaming sunsetladen violet haze proliferated inside a brain left weak and bemused by the power of his mouth claiming hers again. And again, again, again. “I can’t believe I almost let you go,” he murmured, leaving her behind at last. Leaving her lips behind as he pulled away the tiniest bit. Leaving her tremulous, quivering and pleading body behind, too as his hands moved away. As they allowed the shirt to fall back across her and conceal her, the thin and worn fabric seeming suddenly to take on the weight and consistency of lead. Seeming to become an impenetrable shield designed only to keep them apart for ever. For as long as forever might last. “No!” Struggling to insinuate herself back into the circle of arms that had continued to loosen their grip until they’d slackened completely around her, preparing to drop away entirely so that she’d be left bereft and aching with the unfilled void he’d created inside her, Shalom discovered she lacked the power to do even that much. She lacked the power to hold on to what she’d found and now realized she wanted more, surely, than any woman had ever found herself 246
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wanting a man in all the history of time. She lacked the power completely. Utterly. Pathetically. And this time when she whispered his name in a tremulous voice, the sound she made was one of pure agony. Pure regret. Pure longing. “Nick? Please?” He grunted a little, unintelligibly. And still he stepped away. All the way away. But only far enough to find room to bend his tall body toward hers. Only far enough that he could lower his hands again, to her thighs this time, and to the slightly ragged hem of the old shirt that hung there, tickling her too-sensitized skin with its trailing threads and tormenting it into a state of… He lowered his hands to the hem of her shirt. And she gasped as did he, when he suddenly, without any further prelude or warning, tugged it up. When he tugged it over her head and then tossed it away into the farthest shadows of the dim front hallway. When she stood revealed to him and before him, in a way she couldn’t remember she’d ever been completely revealed…completely on view and completely separated from him by a thin layer of air that quivered with their longing for each other, their longing to touch each other and possess each other…before. “Exquisite,” Nick murmured, running the side of one hand along the side of her breast, pausing long enough to flick an experimenting finger at 247
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the ring embedded in the nipple. But he paused only long enough to flick. Only long enough to smile in half-bemused and halfdelighted anticipation at the twin gold circlets she’d purposely had embedded, on a painful whim and for no apparent reason, in some of the tenderest and most easily agitated flesh of her entire body. “Anyplace else?” he murmured, sounding every bit as bemused and interested as he looked when his hand left the piercing behind and slipped on down, all the way to the jutting swell of her hip. “What?” “Are you pierced anyplace else? Anyplace I should…” Seeming entranced, he broke off midsentence and made no other move. For the longest of times he simply stared at her, seeming fascinated by the sight of her and of what she’d had done to herself, his emerald eyes all but lost, the glittering and wondrous glow of them all but lost, behind the thick-lensed glasses he’d taken to wearing again. Hands trembling, Shalom reached up. She pulled the glasses off and then, concentrating every bit of her attention upon being utterly careful, enormously careful, she folded them and reached behind her to place them just as carefully on a shelf of the bookcase next to the archway that opened into the hallway. 248
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Nick’s hand moved again. At lightning speed his swept around her. Dropping again and sweeping behind her knees, it urged them…without noticeable difficulty, given her advanced state of debilitation…to bend. At the same time his other arm moved with equal speed, capturing her shoulders as she toppled and swinging her up in both of them. Swinging her up to hold her, his lips once again hovering perilously and intoxicatingly close to hers as he peered into her face and whispered hoarsely, “Bedroom. Where?” “Up…” Shalom had to wait a moment then, because Nick seemed to have lost all patience for her answer. Touching his lips to hers greedily, he seemed to have lost all the patience required to wait even long enough for her dazzled and bamboozled mind to frame that answer. “…stairs,” she finished when he had finished. “On the…” Then his mouth closed over hers again. And this time his kiss was so long and so protracted that she almost forgot what he’d asked by the time he gave her the chance to finish. So long and protracted that even as she sighed out the rest of her answer, she knew they were never going to make it…never going to see the inside of that delicately feminine room with the canopied bed left over from a childhood when she’d dreamed of exactly this. When she’d dreamed of being swept 249
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off her feet by some green-eyed, gleaming-haired prince who would carry her away from Pittsburgh, carry her incredibly far, far away from the mundane and the ordinary…from everything she’d ever known or expected in her life. “…right.” Finishing the useless explanation, Shalom barely heard her own voice. Maybe that was because the sound she’d made was so tenuous and insubstantial, barely a hint of mist in the heady stillness that filled the house. Or maybe it was because she was preoccupied, listening to the swirling roar that had started inside her head…a sound that was somehow reminiscent of the sea and yet somehow reminiscent of something else entirely. Something even more powerfully profound than the sea. Something like the roar of a dozen fighter jets flying low overhead. Like the roar of a pride of lions on the prowl and living up entirely to that name…pride. Or maybe it was the sound of a chorus of a hundred-million angels, all singing in perfect unison, perfect harmony, putting on a concert only she could hear because it had specifically been meant only for her to hear. Definitely, the heavy and beating pulsing sound that underlay the roar was the sound of Nick’s heart, beating out a thunderous jackhammer rhythm as he turned toward the stairs, the heavy muscles in his arms almost 250
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creaking with the effort of making even that much movement…even that simple movement. They were never going to make it to the canopied bed. Never. And it seemed Nick knew that, too. With her head ducked, pressed tight against the throbbing flesh of his chest, flesh that seemed actually to seethe and jerk with every tormented thudding of his heart, Shalom couldn’t see his face. Couldn’t see what he was doing, or where he was looking. But she could feel him looking around, distracted almost to the point of insanity. She could feel the wildness in his deep-green eyes, could feel it growing wilder with every passing second as he searched for a place to put her. A place to do to her what it was now certain he would have to do to her if either of them was to live beyond this moment. “Can’t…” he groaned, his voice fragmented and shattered, exactly the way Shalom had begun to feel fragmented inside. Too shattered to know what to do next. Too shattered, stunned by the heat of the hands that held her naked and eager body close to his, close to the smooth and suddenly annoying fabric of his shirt, to even imagine what she might do or could do to end this torture…end this agony of torment, by… “We won’t make it,” he murmured, his knees folding beneath him with uncommon grace, 251
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almost inhuman and otherworldly grace, as he lowered her to the floor in the center of her tiny living room, halfway between the sofa that was too small and too slick to be practical and the enormous window that looked directly out onto the street, directly into the just as enormous and unobstructed windows of neighboring houses across the street. Into the windows of Mrs. Slawinski’s front room, where the nosy old lady kept constant tabs through her binoculars on everything that went on around her. Everything. The thought made Shalom’s blood run cold. As cold as it was possible for it to run with Nick towering over her, with the fibers of the threadbare carpet at her back seeming suddenly, inexplicably, to absorb most of her soaring body heat and then transmit it back to her, stinging in its prickly intensity and scorching in its thick relentlessness. “Nick…” She gasped again, more with fear than with impending delight this time. “Curtains! Let me…” Shrugging free of his shirt, struggling with trousers that seemed to want only to defy him and stymie him, Nick paid her no attention. Finally flinging the clothes away with a swiftly impatient and frustrated gesture, he dropped to the floor and reached for her. Lying next to her in the hazy 252
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dimness of her own living room, he reached for her still-quivering, more-than-ever-quivering midsection with a hand that seemed no more steady and no more capable of purposeful movement or action. “Shalom,” he breathed, his fingertips striking blazing embers when they met her skin…embers she could almost see sparking in the interior gloom. Embers she felt certain must attract every shred of Mrs. Slawinski’s sometimes divided attention with their brilliance of flashing and strobing and flickering. If the old gossip’s attention hadn’t already been attracted, of course, by the steamy explosion of Nick O’Hara’s mouth meeting Shalom’s in that first, that rapturous and not-to-be-dismissed kiss. “Curtains,” Shalom tried again in a hoarse and desperate voice, actually stretching an arm out straight above her head in a futile attempt to bridge distance that was not quite bridgeable, to reach the hem of the heavy white drapes and tug them closed against all odds…against the firmness and strength of new traverse rods that would only prevent her doing any such thing. And then it was too late. Then she didn’t care about anything any more, as Nick’s mouth found her again. As it found the straining and pierced peak of her nipple and covered it, instantly laving it with long and supple strokes of pure fire. Pure agony. Pure, needful, hurting and debilitating 253
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want. It was too late, and Shalom didn’t care any more. Let the old lady see. Let her get an eyeful, let her see a real show. Let her even talk endlessly about it as she inevitably would, filling in every other person on the block…every person the old biddy would consider of ‘proper’ age, at any rate…on every detail of what Nick O’Hara had done to Shalom Wilson and every detail of what Shalom Wilson had done to him. Let her! Shalom wasn’t a nun. She’d never claimed to be a nun. And if the old biddy thought she was going to live out the rest of her life as a nun… Shalom didn’t care. Because Nick was already doing something to her. Something more than inciting towering walls of flame inside her with the smoothly lapping strokes of tongue against a nipple that couldn’t possibly grow more fervent with desire or more tight with excitement. A nipple that couldn’t, but still tried anyway. Clinging to him, her face buried tight against the smooth and lightly silky hair at the very top of his head, Shalom felt her heart miss a ragged beat when he gave her nipple one last, teasing tweak. When he caught it gently between lips that closed upon it and tugged. When he tugged lightly, once 254
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again working his tongue around the small ring she’d been assured would heighten sensation, would make her nipples even more sensitive and even more receptive to both pain and pleasure. She couldn’t have said if it was pain or pleasure, though. She could only say the sensation…a blazing, steaming column of pure and unadulterated sensation…shot with rocket speed downward from the point where he pulled so gently. Shot downward and lodged itself tight and hard in the even more tender and even more easily aroused flesh between her legs. The private flesh that, even though it had never been pierced and never in this life would be pierced… “Nick?” she whispered, and his response was lost in the flesh to which he’d devoted himself with such undying loyalty, such complete and exclusive intensity that no other bit of flesh might have existed for him and no other bit of flesh had ever held such enormous importance for him. “Take me, Nick?” For a moment she thought he hadn’t heard. For a moment he only continued what he’d been doing, nuzzling repeatedly at the breast he’d claimed for his own, tugging repeatedly at the ring embedded in the very tip of that breast, making small and appreciative, wordless sounds deep in the back of his throat as he did so. Then he stopped. Too abruptly, with a sudden abandonment of 255
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her that sent up a shrieking yet unheard wail of despair from every fiber and every cell of her overworked and overextended body, he stopped. And looked at her. Lifted his head to gaze at her with thoughtful green eyes. Emerald eyes that bore deep into hers as if seeking out some kind of answers within her soul itself. Eyes that seemed to question at the same time they appraised, that seemed to spark with a sudden devilishness of inspiration even as they questioned again her ability to withstand and cooperate in whatever that inspiration was. “Are you sure?” he murmured, his eyes glinting even more than they had the instant before. “I’m…” Shalom felt her body begin to rise. Felt it begin to lift itself into a long and sleek arch as it strained for him, strained for more of his in-noway-soothing touch. “Please?” And then his hands were upon her again. His hands were upon and around the waist she’d lifted completely away from the floor in her urgency to have him. They fastened firmly, inescapably around a waist that had never felt so small before, or so delicately wispy. They fastened upon her and were turning her. Insistently, irresistibly turning her.
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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
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he was putty in his hands. She had been ever since the moment he’d touched his lips to hers, never intending to do anything of the kind because he was mad at her. Mad as hell, dammit, for what she’d done. In no way ready to forgive or forget. Of course his anger had evaporated at the instant of contact. It had evaporated, been forgotten, been lost forever as the inconsequential and irrelevant thing it had truly been. Lost. As he himself was about to be lost when he grabbed her around the middle…such a tiny and compliant middle in the palms of large and determined hands…and rolled over, onto his back, carrying her with him. “What?” she protested, struggling a little to right herself, right both of them…struggling in a way that only made his dick ache more and harden more than it had the first time he’d spotted 257
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the twin circlets of gold with which she’d pierced the peaks of her breasts. The way it ached and swelled to impossible proportions every time he caught sight of them and every time he imagined, his mouth watering and his own nipples automatically tingling with supposed sensations… But he couldn’t imagine. He’d seen her eyes when he tweaked those rings. He’d seen the results of what his tweakings did to her. What they aroused in her. And he meant to experiment some more. Meant to see what else he could do to her with his manipulations of those bits of metal she wore like badges of sexual honor. But not now. Holding her firmly locked between his hands as she tried one more time, feebly and ineffectually, to reverse herself out of the position he’d chosen for her and in which he would hold her at all costs, Nick knew the time for experimentation…that kind of experimentation…had passed. Even if it would come again, sooner rather than later if he had anything to say about it, this was a time for something else. This was a time for… Automatically, without his having to direct her or guide her in any but the most perfunctory and general of ways, Shalom assumed the position he desired for her. She bent her legs at the knees, placing the soles of her feet flat on the floor next to 258
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his thighs in her straining and struggling efforts to break away from what she obviously didn’t understand. Though she soon would. She lowered her hands too, placing them flat against the floor next to his elbows, her own already tight and locked. In exactly the perfect place for what he had in mind. “What?” she said again, ceasing her struggle when it became obvious she couldn’t succeed. “Like this,” he murmured, using the pressure he still held at her waist to lower her. Down and down, her silken-skinned ass meeting the not-sosilken but thoroughly goose-fleshed skin of his thighs as he found the opening to her and slipped her onto him. It was a quick motion. A backward sliding of engorged flesh into the already-quivering, immediately grasping receptacle for which it had been intended. A quick motion that left her gasping and wriggling for comfort, her arms stretching delightfully, her legs tightening in a way that also tightened the muscles with which he forced her to hold him inside her. A motion that left her wriggling in a way even his imagination hadn’t prepared him for. A way that shot a bolt of pure current through a dick that engaged in a crazed electrical dance as it tried to induce more and more of that same shattering delight, that same shivering and shining and shocking arousal. “My God,” she murmured, her voice a mere, 259
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shallow imitation of itself as he lifted her with the hands that encircled her waist, completely in control of everything she would do and everything she would feel. As he lifted her off him… lifted her slowly, fascinated by the tight drag of encompassing flesh around his own… against his flesh that, having captured her and made a helpless slave of her, now sought to make the enslavement complete. That now sought to make her cry out for him, make her scream his name until she lost her voice and could scream no more. Make her continue to scream even then, in broken and rasping echoes of sound that couldn’t be screams because she no longer had any screams to give. He wanted all of that. And he wanted even more. He wanted devotion. Absolute and unquestioning. Wanted to play with those golden nipple rings, though at the moment they were out of sight. At the moment her back was to him, and all he could do was dream about seeing them again and playing with them again. All he could do was dream about the resultant surging of hard heat he’d feel inside his dick when he finally did get to play with them. Once again burying himself inside her, tugging her helpless body that strained just to hold itself erect above him, he tried…and failed…to imagine how it felt to her when he played with those 260
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unbelievably enticing shimmers of metal. He could only try to and could only want…need, in every way it was possible for a human being to need anything in this life or any life…to feel it for himself. Could only want to have the same thing done to himself, the same small rounds of golden enticement embedded in his flesh so that Shalom could play with his as he played with hers. So that she could see the same leaping of fire and lust in his eyes that he saw in hers every time he tweaked or tugged at one of them. Nick was a conservative man. Like his father before him and his tweed-wearing, pillar-ofsociety mother. He’d never in his life considered piercing any part of himself. If anything, he’d always considered that an aberration, something done frequently and eagerly in ancient times and some that weren’t so ancient. Something done only by the uninformed who didn’t understand or weren’t capable of caring about what they were doing to their own bodies. But he was considering it now. Oh, God, was he considering it! With a leaping in his dick that stemmed mostly from imagination at what it would feel like as the slivers of metal slid into his flesh for the first time…the absolute pain of it that was only, was absolutely, necessary if he wanted to feel the pleasure they would bring 261
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him later, after the slivers had become a part of him. Pleasure Shalom would arouse just by looking, just by witnessing. And when her fingers touched them…touched him as he surrounded what he’d made an integral and inseparable part of himself…when her smooth cherry lips caught at his rings and tugged… The imagining was almost more than he could bear. Almost more than his innate and inborn, tweedy conservatism could bear. Because oh, God, the way the imagining made him feel! The added impetus it gave to his dick as it repeatedly buried itself in the softness he’d poised so deliberately above himself so that he would have complete control…complete power over it. And that was another thing. That was a very curious, an absolutely inexplicable, thing. He’d never been a man who craved this kind of power. Never been a man who wanted to take a woman as fiercely as he wanted to take Shalom, or in as many ways as seemed just naturally to flood into his brain every time his dick found her and made its home inside her. He’d never been the kind of man who thrived on knowing he’d made someone helpless, knowing someone was at his mercy and he could do whatever he wanted to her. Knowing he could make her want him to do whatever he wanted to her. 262
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But he was that kind of man now. Shalom had made him that kind of man. And there would be no going back. For either of them. There was no way to go now but forward, and Nick did. Tightening his arms with a sudden jerking of muscle and tendon just as Shalom reached the height of another forced withdrawal from the instrument with which he’d gained his control of her, he pulled her down. Pulled her hard, with an abruptness of motion and a sudden impaling of flesh that did indeed make her cry out. But not enough. Not loudly enough, or with enough force to ease the sudden and overpowering need to hear her scream. At him and to him. For him. “Scream,” he ordered in a voice that rasped, completely harsh and completely dictatorial as he shoved her away from him again, all the while marveling at the way her open and monsoondrenched flesh conformed to each and every change he inflicted upon her. “B…but the neighbors,” she gasped, her arms straining as they reached the full limit at which she was capable of supporting herself in her backward-bent position. “Wh…what about…” “Screw the neighbors,” he growled, holding her motionless at the very tip of his dick and drawing enormous delight from her struggle to lower herself down and onto him again. The struggle she had to know she could never win, but which she 263
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tried valiantly and with every part of herself to win nonetheless. “Scream,” he ordered again. “Scream your sweet little lungs out, or by God you’ll never have this again.” He punctuated the words, the verbal brutality that only an hour ago would have seemed foreign and utterly unthinkable to him, with a slight downward motion of her body. A slight motion that enabled her to take in a bit more of his length before he deliberately, all too soon if her soft murmur of despair was any indication, lifted her away again. “Scream!” he shouted. And she did. She tried. But what came out was only a fragment of the sound he needed to hear. Only a pathetic fragment, wheezed from a throat that sounded like it had already closed, long before there was any reason for it to close. “You call that a scream?” He still held her poised, held her struggling and writhing, fighting as much to keep her balance as she was to claim him, with the very smallest amount of his flesh pressed against the opening between her greedy and wet, shivering folds. She tried again. A little better this time. Her voice was still thin and watery, still lacking the real depth of emotion Nick craved. But at least 264
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some amount of sound spiraled up from her parted lips. Some amount of sound made its way to the ceiling and seemed to hover there for a pathetic fraction of a fraction of a second. “Louder,” he ordered. “Scream, Shalom. Scream so the whole world will hear, the whole world will know what I’m doing to you right now. Scream for me, and I promise you’ll have your reward. Scream for me the way I want you to scream, and I promise you’ll have all the reward you could ever desire. More reward than you could ever desire.” She tried again. But the sound was still more whimper than scream, still more rasp than the full-bodied cry of a woman in unmistakable heat, a woman whose body had begun to pour forth tidal waves of scorching, drowning moisture that made it harder by the second for him to avoid giving her what she so obviously craved. “Scream,” he growled, tightening his grip to punishing heaviness around her waist when she tried to writhe free of it and allow the force of gravity to grant what she couldn’t attain by any other means. This time she did. Tilting her head back against her shoulders, tilting it so completely and so far back that a swirling waterfall of copper-colored hair dropped like silken fire across his face and into his eyes, blinding him absolutely and maybe permanently 265
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with the steam-heat of its touch, Shalom emptied her lungs in a massive effort that left her body straining into a tight arc above his. That left her thrusting her pierced and delightful, enormous tits straight up, straight at a ceiling that couldn’t give them one small scintilla of the satisfaction and pleasure they deserved simply for being enormous and being pierced. A ceiling decorated by fluttering reflections from her small gold rings. Reflections that shivered and quivered as they danced across the white-painted blandness above him and above them. “Do you ever wear a chain?” he asked, deciding to prolong her torture even now that it had become exactly that for both of them. Torture of the worst possible, the worst imaginable or conceivable kind. “Wh…wha…” Her question broke off with another mindless gush of a scream. A scream that didn’t end this time, but only ululated into another and even longer scream. A whole series of screams, repeated endlessly and interminably as her entire body flexed, first hardening and then going almost completely limp with the force of each burst of agonized, demanding, supplicating sound from lungs that possessed more capacity for sound than Nick had ever dreamed. Than he had ever hoped for. She screamed mindlessly, managing somehow to overcome even the strongest of his pressures 266
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enough to sway her hips back and forth. She screamed witlessly, flinging her stinging curtains of red hair across his face time and again as if she was all too aware that was the only way she could hope to return any of the punishment he inflicted. The only way she could ever hope to return even the smallest portion of what he inflicted. She screamed inhumanly, the sound crashing against walls and ceilings, floors and woodwork as the small duplex filled with her sounds of need and tormented suffering. She screamed for him. And he hardened for her. Hardened and gave her what she wanted. What she’d been pleading for with all her heart as the screams transformed themselves from wordless percussions of sound into one shrieked word. One single, repetitiously repeated word. “Please, please, please, please!” she begged, each repetition screamed with more power than seemed humanly possible. More power than seemed humanly probable or humanly survivable. She begged him and he slipped her down. Slipped her very slowly onto him, feeling the pressure rising inside himself with each slow degree of reward he allowed her. Each agonizingly slow, tenaciously teasing degree of reward her surging, seething, flowing and burning body accepted. 267
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“You s…said s…something…” she gasped much later, her voice and her still-straining, stillwrithing body making it clear a gasp was nearly all she could manage. “Ab…bout a chain…you…” “I just wondered,” he murmured, releasing her at last so she could sit atop him, could straddle him with his dick still firmly a part of her. So she could drop her knees to the floor and use her newfound leverage to raise and lower herself repeatedly, swiftly, along a dick that was rapidly approaching the breaking point…that in another minute or two was going to give her the ultimate reward. Going to… He should pull back! Something inside him screamed, every bit as loudly as he’d made Shalom scream for him. He should push her off him and away from him before… Dimly, there floated through his mind that old, half-formed memory. The one he’d fought for so long to put behind him and what Shalom had, probably inadvisedly, allowed him to put behind himself for much too long. The memory of the mistake he’d made. The one he was still paying for with both cash and emotional agony, the one he’d continue paying for for years and years yet to come. The memory of Susan Tarwood at fifteen. Susan, with her stomach enormously swollen, enormously pregnant. Susan, bearing the evidence of the one time he’d given in to her accomplished 268
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charms, the one time he’d allowed her to seduce him as she’d tried to seduce all the boys, into giving up his virginity for her beneath the bleachers on the football practice field. Susan, enormously pregnant and already possibly feeling the first warning of contractions yet to come. Susan, standing in the front door of his father’s house with her mother…her very large and extremely angry mother…behind her, demanding of Nick O’Hara’s father that he look at what his son had done to her ‘sweet baby’. That he look and tell her what his son intended to do about this. Nick had never gotten over the humiliation. Never gotten over the horror of looking into Susan’s eyes and seeing the small glimmer of selfsatisfied glee there, the small glimmer that exactly matched and perfectly complemented the smug and superior little twitching of her lips as she folded her arms and clasped her hands tightly together beneath the pink-swathed enormity of her pregnant belly. Susan, the whore. Susan, the high-school slut. Susan, whom he hadn’t seen since a month or two after his single, disastrous encounter with her beneath the bleachers. Not until the day she appeared with her mother to demand he pay…demand he pay through the nose and quite possibly for the rest of his life…for his one moment of heated indiscretion. The one moment 269
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when Susan had encouraged and he’d complied all too willingly. All too foolishly. The memory of Susan and all that went along with Susan flashed through his mind in the infinitesimal space of time it took his belabored and afflicted heart to complete one single, offkilter beat. A memory accompanied by one last, admittedly half-hearted internal scream that it was time to pull away now, while he was still safe. While he could still avoid… But this wasn’t Susan working so feverishly over him. This wasn’t Susan or anyone like Susan who hovered over him and upon him now, using every bit of her strength as her body came and came and came, pouring out the results of everything either of them had ever done to the other for his exclusive enjoyment and delight. This had never been Susan. Not this vibrant, copperhaired and supple-limbed enchantress who, her little escapade with the e-mail list notwithstanding, had never had an evil or underhanded thought in her life. He felt sure of that. As sure as he felt of the love that swirled up from Shalom and around her. As sure as he felt his own love, reaching out to intertwine with hers and combine with it in a way that could never again be either one or the other. As sure as he felt that Shalom would never entrap him…never use him, or take advantage of him, or make demands from 270
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him…the way Susan had done. The way Susan continued to do and would continue to continue until the day when their daughter…when Nikki, who had looked exactly like him the one time he’d been allowed to see her, when she’d been four and hadn’t had a clue in the world who he was or what she meant to him…reached her eighteenth birthday and the payment would stop. “You said something about a chain.” Barely able to gasp now, Shalom still persisted. “What…” “I wanted to know…” Nick was gasping, too. Gasping hard, gasping with torturously fought-for breaths that failed absolutely to fill his lungs or even to supply more than the bare minimum intake of air required to sustain his life. “If you ever wore…” “A ch…chain.” Her body tightened around his. It tightened as much, surely, as it was ever going to be able to tighten. And her motions atop him, all the motions designed and intended to derive ultimate satisfaction from the swollen rod of flesh she held so diligently inside with his full and fervent blessing…her motions grew stronger. Filling with a new desperation, a new hinting of all kinds of ends drawing near and all kinds of beginnings following close behind, her motions grew more urgent and more determined. “Bet…tween my breasts?”
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CHAPTER NINETEEN
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ick never answered. Shalom thought she probably hadn’t given him the time or left him with the strength for an answer. But answers hardly mattered. Nothing mattered now except what was going on inside her. What was going on between them…the same thing that had been going on for what seemed an incredibly long time. The thing that now, suddenly, amplified itself a dozen times over. A hundred or quite possibly even a thousand times over. Nothing mattered except the tide of unabashed and unabated fire that swept through her in the same instant that she felt the long and slow shimmering of her body’s final release sweep from her. Nick lay motionless now. Motionless, stunned, dazed as she felt his body gathering the way hers did, As it marshaled its last resources for the final…final… 272
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And then he came. With blistering speed, his body jerked. His long and fully engaged shaft jerked. And from it poured a stream of sweet, molten light. A stream of potent wonder that imprinted itself immediately, irrevocably, upon every innermost part of her body and her soul. Nick jerked. He groaned. He came. And so did Shalom. The tide of her body first swelled, then topped, then burst forward in a roaring whitecap accompanied by ground-quaking thunder the likes of which had never been known before…the likes of which had never been generated by any human creature before. The tide of her body burst from her as if in direct opposition to the tide Nick was sending into her. As if it thought to swamp the flow of his and overwhelm it. As if it thought it had a chance. “My God,” Nick groaned, and it was the groan of a man who knew he’d reached the last seconds before death. A man who regretted that death, but already had begun to glimpse the beyond. A man who knew something greater awaited him even as the old was lost. A man who welcomed that greatness because it was a better greatness…a more peaceful, more fulfilling and more lasting kind of greatness. He groaned a second time, and the sound of it shattered the spell. 273
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Suddenly they were nothing more profound than earthly lovers bound by the laws of earth and the boundaries of earth. Suddenly they were tired and spent lovers, toppling away from each other to lie side by side on their backs on rough carpet. Side by side in a feeble ray of sunshine that broke through the day’s gloomy grayness almost too late to illuminate their mutually exhausted and mutually drained flesh for anyone who cared to look. Any old busybody who might be looking right now, using the binoculars with which she kept her up close and personal tabs over her slice of the world from her windows on the other side of the street. Suddenly, they were at peace next to each other. Absolute peace, so shocking and so unexpected after the torment of his teeth playing with the rings in her nipples, that Shalom could scarcely bring herself to believe it was happening. Could scarcely bring herself to believe this kind of restful, satisfied and sated peace could ever exist after… Slowly, shuddering as if the effort cost everything he’d held in reserve for the continuance of his life, Nick turned himself over. And just as slowly, with another shudder that turned quickly into a long and low moan of breathless exhaustion, he propped himself up with his elbows and gazed at her with incredible, more274
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emerald-than-ever eyes. “Victorian ladies wore chains,” he murmured, reaching out to touch the ring in her right nipple and give it a small and playful tweak. “Did you know that?” “Between their breasts?” Attempting to lift her head, to look him full in the eyes and try to read his expression and his intentions there, Shalom failed miserably. She lacked the strength to lift anything. Not even if her life should suddenly depend upon it. “I didn’t know Victorian ladies even pierced their…I thought they were all prim, all proper and…” “But they did.” Playful, flitting, Nick’s fingers left her nipple and meandered down to the lower slope of her breast. To push against it and shove at it, lifting the mound of pale flesh to a fully upright, fully pointed and impossibly high position. “It’s an ancient form of adornment.” Seeming mesmerized by the sight of her breast, by the rise and fall of it as her chest rose and fell beneath it with each intake and exhalation of breath, he smiled a little. Smiled very faintly. “The Romans pierced their nipples, too. The soldiers did. And then it caught on again with the Victorians. It was quite the fad with the ladies of the time. But they wore chains between their rings.” His voice turned faintly accusing on the last sentence. As if Shalom had set out deliberately 275
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to deny him something enticing, something intoxicating, by not doing the same. “They wore fine gold chains that dangled against their skin.” Moving his hand, he turned it. He abandoned the breast that immediately sagged back into its natural position and once again stroked his fingertips across the sensitive skin of her nipple, all around the twinkling gold of its ring. Shalom shuddered at the lightness… the unearthly and unmanageable suggestiveness… of the touch. “You want me to wear a chain now?” “I can imagine how it would look,” he murmured, obviously entranced again, though this time not touching. This time only looking. “I can imagine what it would be like to play with it.” Now it was Shalom’s turn to shudder. And shiver. She was having a few imaginary visions of her own. Visions that might…just might…bear looking into. Visions that might bear making into reality. If the time was ever right. If they were ever right. Which was a very big ‘if’, because the remnants of Nick’s earlier anger still lay between them like a blight of darkness and rot cast over what should in this moment have been nothing but perfect, nothing but the most harmonious happiness. “Nick,” she murmured, rolling over so that her breasts met prickly carpet and the rings hid themselves from his greedy emerald gaze. “We 276
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have to talk.” “We do,” he said, sounding no less rapt for his loss of the sight of what fascinated him. “We have to…” “I need to know where you went. Where you had yourself pierced that way.” “Why?” With a sudden and uneasy leaping of her heart and her stomach, it occurred to Shalom that Nick might not be as pleased with the piercings as she’d thought. He might not be pleased with them at all and might, in the way his eyes and his expression and even his whole attitude sometimes said he could, be looking to make trouble for the strangely sweet-faced, aging Motorcycle Mama who’d done the job. “I…” To Shalom’s surprise, Nick blushed. Beet-red. Scarlet-red. Crimson. Vermilion. Maroon. “What is it, Nick?” At last she found the strength to lift her head and look at him. “What are you…” “I want to go there,” he replied, looking more rosy-faced distraught and embarrassed than ever. “Today. I want to have the same thing done to me.” “You do? Why?” Involuntarily, remembering, she shuddered. “It hurts like hell at first, you know. When they do it.” “I have no doubt that it does.” His smile was lazy. Determined. Telling her there was no pain on 277
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earth he was afraid to bear. No pain on earth he would even try to avoid if it meant meeting goals and motives that weren’t yet entirely clear to her. “Then, why…” “I want to know how it feels. I want to know why your eyes light up and your body begins to quiver whenever I touch you there. I want you to see that light in my eyes and know you’re doing something to me that’s fabulous. Something that’s…” Here, seeming to run out of words at last, he folded his arms atop the carpet and dropped his face against them. “Fine,” she said reluctantly. “We can do that. If you want. But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about.” “I know.” He never moved. He simply lay with his face buried against his arms, his face almost touching the carpet and buried deep in the worn and faded nap of it. “We need to talk about that other thing,” she went on. “About that damned, cursed list.” “I know,” he said again and finally sat up. Crossing his legs lightly at the ankles, he sat with them splayed and one hand reaching automatically to adjust his shaft at first and then, unconsciously, unashamedly to play with the shrunken and used-up length of it as if he thought by playing with it he might coax a little bit of the old vim and vigor back into it. “I’ve been meaning to ask if I can see this list.” 278
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Now it was Shalom’s turn to blush, and she did. She felt herself redden as badly as Nick had reddened before. “I’m afraid I don’t have a copy of the list.” “But if you were following it, using me to…” “My friend Carly has it.” He nodded, a look of understanding glimmering across his face. “Carly. The one who supposedly instigated the whole insane mess in the beginning.” Shalom shook her head. “Carly, the one who did instigate it. The one who’s instigated every bit of trouble I’ve ever embroiled myself in. In my entire life.” “Sounds like quite a girl.” Shalom shook her head again. “Why do you want to see the list?” The ghost of a smile played itself across his lips, only to vanish immediately and reappear, more permanently settled, in his eyes. “I want to know what I’m up against.” “Surely you don’t think I’d…” Shalom heard shock echo in her own voice and was powerless to stop it. Powerless even to do anything to hide it. “You don’t really think I’d still keep on trying to score points, do you? When you…when we…” Nick’s smile broadened. The warmth of it in his eyes flared, then deepened. “I really don’t know what you’d do, Shalom. And that’s one of the things I love most about you. That might be the 279
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one thing I absolutely love the most about you.” His gaze flicked down for a moment. Down, to the breasts she held hidden against the carpet. “That and the rings, of course.” Love. Love? Love! For a long, long moment, realizing what Nick had said and the way in which he’d said it, as if it was absolutely true and one of the irrefutable and taken-for-granted facts in the world or even the universe, Shalom could hardly breathe. Could breathe only with the greatest and most hitching of efforts as the reality of what he’d said sank in. Love. He’d really used the word. Really, his eyes shimmering with the depth of it, been feeling it for some time now. Feeling it, maybe, for as long as she’d felt it. “Then there are no hard feelings?” she demanded when she finally could. Nick’s gaze never left her face. But hers left his. Attracted by some small movement, some movement that should have been completely irrelevant but wasn’t, her gaze dropped down. To the hand that still touched his shaft. To the hand that closed around his shaft, surrounding it in the same way she’d once surrounded it with all of her body as he laughed a little and said, “I think I can promise there are 280
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going to be all kinds of hard feelings around here. From now on.” Dazed, she lifted her eyes to meet his. Dazed, she saw again the fire burning in his and realized she’d been wrong about the depth of it. Wrong, too, about the intensity of it. Because it was hotter than she’d remembered. It was scorching-hot, hot enough to burn through her and burn into her even at a distance. Even without an actual, physical touch. “Th…there can’t be any m…more points that matter,” she stammered in a voice that surely belonged to somebody else. A voice that surely couldn’t belong to her because it was one she’d never heard before. A very tiny, very squeaky and unsure-of-itself one that seemed to be saying, even if her words didn’t, that she’d follow him anywhere. She’d do anything, go along with anything, if only he… “And why is that?” he murmured, the intensity of his emerald gaze never wavering as he pinned her with it yet again, his hand continuing to fondle idly yet still purposefully at the already enlarging ridge of flesh between his legs. “Why can there never be any more points, I wonder?” “Because.” Licking her lips, Shalom could only stare at the hand stroking his shaft. Could only wonder at, marvel at, his resilience as it began to grow large again. As it began to engorge itself and prepare itself for her. Only for her. 281
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“Because why?” His voice became a silken shimmer of sound. No more substantial than silk and yet every bit as strong. Every bit as naturally, wondrously, impossibly strong and binding. “Because.” Shalom licked her lips again. She fought to tear her gaze away from the flicking fingertips and the growing, swelling, enticing length beneath them. Fought only to discover she could do no such thing. Only to discover she was held by those tiny motions, fascinated by them and enthralled by them. Discovered her own body had begun to prepare itself, too. Discovered it had begun, against all odds possible or probable, to moisten and soften and grow deliciously weak in all the ways it did whenever Nick touched her or even looked like he was going to touch her. Discovered she wanted him more now than ever. Which of course was going to be less than she’d want him in the moments after this. Less than she’d want him in every moment that followed this one, for as long as either of them lived. And longer. Much, much longer. “Because,” she said again, her voice turning to a low and sultry whisper that conveyed perfectly all the depths and nuances of her desire for him, “from now on there’s only going to be one kind of sex. The kind that counts.” 282
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A
native of a small town not far from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Evelyn Starr always had a passion for the glamorous, the exotic, the sensuous. And she’s always been willing to travel the world in search of them. Among her favorite places are Boldt’s Castle in the Thousand Islands, Tasmania, Australia’s tropical Queensland, and all the nooks and crannies of the Rocky Mountains she now calls home. Like her wanderlust, Evelyn’s fascination with words and stories began at an early age. She remembers being able to read and write before she started school, and by the time she’d finished first grade, she was writing her own little one-page stories. Following graduation from high school, she left her small-town home and hasn’t looked back. She majored in journalism, romance, and adventure, and eventually married her college sweetheart, who remains the most romantic, and the most adventurous, hero of them all.
