long. “And you’re going to try to tell me it isn’t, is that right?”
Slade sighed, shook his head, opened his computer case and took out his spare battery.
“It’s painful to be misjudged, Sugar.” He held out the battery, his expression one of wide-eyed innocence. “You need a battery for your computer and I just happen to have an extra. Now, does that sound like a pickup line to you?”
She looked back at him for what seemed forever. Just when he thought she was going to send him packing, he saw the corner of her mouth twitch.
“Yes,” she said.
“Well, you’re right,” he said. “But you have to admit, it’s creative.”
She laughed, and he laughed, and that was the way it all began.
“Hi,” he said, and held out his hand. “I’m Slade.”
She hesitated, then took his hand. “I’m Lara.”
Lara. It seemed just right for this woman. Soft, feminine, yet with a certain strength to it. It was a pleasant contradiction in terms, just like her handshake, which was strong, almost masculine. Still, her fingers were long and delicate, and her hand seemed lost in his.
A tiny electric jolt passed between them.
“Static electricity,” she said quickly, and pulled back her hand.
“Sure,” Slade said, but he didn’t think so. And, from the flush that rose in her lovely face, he didn’t think she thought so, either.
“I couldn’t help but overhear your, uh, your conversation.” He smiled. “The one you were having with yourself. I didn’t actually hear what you called your dead battery, but I have a pretty good imagination.”
She laughed. “I’m afraid I wasn’t being very polite.”
“I’m serious about giving you that extra battery.”
“Thanks, but I can do without it.”
“Well, I’ll lend it to you, then. So you can finish up whatever you were doing.”
“It’s the ‘whatever’ part that I was going for this time.” She smiled, and he told himself he’d never known that a woman’s smile could light a room until now. “I was going to play a game of solitaire.”
Slade grinned. “Computer solitaire. The wonder of the age. One card or three?”
“One, of course,” Lara said primly. “Timed, with Vegas rules.”
“The deck with the palm trees?”
She laughed. “Uh-huh. I like that little face that appears, the one that grins when you least expect it.”
“Try getting a regular deck of cards to grin at you,” Slade said, and they both laughed and began to talk, bouncing from topic to topic as strangers usually do, except he wasn’t really sure what he said, or what she said.
He was too busy watching the play of emotion on her face when she laughed, the way she had of widening her eyes when he said something amusing. He was too busy listening to her voice, which was husky and soft and sexy as hell, even though he had the feeling she didn’t know it was sexy any more than she knew that little way she had of pushing her hair back from her ear was starting to make him have to curl his hand into a fist to keep from reaching out and doing it himself.
Up close, the suit was still demure but now that he could see a hint of the body beneath it, he knew he’d never think of a suit the same way again. And her scent. Lilacs, he thought. Or maybe lilies of the valley.
“…don’t you think?” she said, and Slade nodded and said yes, he definitely did, and hoped he was saying yes to the right thing, because he hadn’t heard the question. He told himself he was being ridiculous, to get his jaw off the floor and his brain into gear.
“That’s why I think of it as The Dead Battery Conspiracy,” Lara said. “You know. You do all the right things, keep their batteries charged—”
Oh, yes, Slade thought, while he kept smiling like an idiot, yes, indeed, there was nothing like keeping your batteries charged.
“You turn them on carefully—”
Carefully? Hell, he didn’t want to be turned on carefully. He wanted to scoop her up, drag her off into a dark corner and ravish that mouth and that body.
“—but they don’t work. They never do, when you want them to.”
“No,” Slade finally said, and cleared his throat and changed the topic before he made a spectacle of himself in public.
They talked some more. Or, rather, he talked. She just listened. After a while, he noticed a strange look on her face. He wondered if he was boring her but then he realized it wasn’t that. She looked…contemplative. Yeah, that was the word. She smiled in all the right places but he had the feeling she was weighing the consequences of something important, and that whatever it was, it was beyond his comprehension.
It gave him a funny feeling, one he didn’t like. So he stopped, in the middle of a sentence, and said, “How about some coffee?”
Lara blinked. She looked back at the coffee bar, then at him.
“Yes,” she said finally. “Yes, I’d like that.”
He rose from his chair. She did, too. They walked to the rear of the lounge, poured some coffee, sat down on a small sofa in a corner and went on with their conversation about inconsequential things. Weather, and flying, and how some airports were better than others, but all the while they were chatting, he knew it was only a cover for what was really happening between them.
They were turning each other on.
That little shot of electricity came again, when he refilled her cup. Their hands brushed, and the resultant spark made them jump.
“Whoops,” she said, with a little laugh, “one of us needs to be grounded before we go up in flames.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Slade said, with a smile. “Going up in flames might be fun.”
Their eyes met and held, and then she looked away and they talked about carpets and static electricity, about everything but the tension stretching between them.
He told himself it was nothing unusual. He was a man who enjoyed women. He always had, ever since the divorced wife of a neighboring rancher back home in Texas had decided to give him herself as a gift for his sixteenth birthday. He liked women, liked the way they sounded and looked and moved. And women liked him. So yeah, he’d sat in a bar, or gone to a party, he’d looked at a woman and she at him and bam, the connection had clicked and the both of them had known they were going to end up in bed together.
But, dammit, this was different. Who was he trying to kid? He wanted this woman with a need that was almost painful. He wanted her in his arms, wanted the scent of her arousal on his skin, the taste of her on his tongue, the hot wetness of her closing around him.
And
