had risen from his seat on the stairs. “We have to talk,” he said to Amanda.
She shook her head, grateful now for Jordan’s presence and his grasp on her hand. “There’s nothing to say.”
The man she had once loved arched an eyebrow. “Isn’t there? You could start by introducing me to the new man in your life.”
It was Jordan who spoke. “Jordan Richards,” he said evenly, without offering his hand.
James studied him with new interest flickering in his shrewd eyes. “Brockman,” he answered. “James Brockman.”
A glance at Jordan revealed that he recognized the name—anyone active in the business world would have—but he clearly wasn’t the least bit intimidated. He simply nodded an acknowledgment.
Amanda ran her tongue over her lips. “Let us pass, James,” she said. She’d never spoken so authoritatively to him before, but she took no pleasure in the achievement because she knew she wouldn’t have managed it if Jordan hadn’t been there.
James did not look at Amanda, but at Jordan. Some challenge passed between them, and the air was charged with static electricity for several moments. Then James stepped aside to lean against the banister, leaving barely enough room for Jordan and Amanda to walk by.
“Richards.”
Jordan stopped, still holding Amanda’s hand, and looked back at James over one shoulder in inquiry.
“I’ll call your office Monday morning. I’d be interested to know what we have in common—where investments are concerned, naturally.”
Amanda felt her face heat. Again she tried to pull away from Jordan; again he restrained her. “Naturally,” Jordan responded coldly, and then he continued up the stairway, bringing Amanda with him.
“I’m sorry,” she said the moment they were alone in her apartment. She was leaning against the closed door.
“Why?” Jordan asked, reaching out to unbutton her coat. He helped her out of it, then hung it on the brass tree. Amanda watched him with injury in her eyes as he removed his jacket and put it with her coat.
She had been leaning against the door again, and she thrust herself away. “Because of James, of course.”
“It wasn’t your fault he came here.”
She sighed and stopped in the tiny entryway, her back to Jordan, the fingers of one hand pressed to her right temple. She knew he was right, but she was slightly nauseous all the same. “That remark he made about what the two of you might have in common…”
Jordan reached out and took her shoulders in his hands, turning her gently to face him. “Your past is your own business, Amanda. I’m interested in the woman you are now, not the woman you were six months or six years ago.”
Amanda blinked, then bit her upper lip for a moment. “But he meant—”
He touched her lip with an index finger. “I know what he meant,” he said with hoarse gentleness. “When and if it happens for us, Amanda, you won’t be the first woman I’ve been with. I’m not going to condemn you because I’m not the first man.”
With that, the subject of that aspect of Amanda’s relationship with James was closed forever. In fact, it was almost as though the subject hadn’t been broached. “Would you like some coffee or something?” she asked, feeling better.
Jordan grinned. “Sure.”
When Amanda came out of the kitchenette minutes later, carrying two mugs of instant coffee, Jordan was studying the blue-and-white patchwork quilt hanging on the wall behind her couch. Gershwin seemed to have become an appendage to his right ankle.
“Did you make this?”
Amanda nodded proudly. “I designed it, too.”
Jordan looked impressed. “So there’s more to you than the mild-mannered assistant hotel manager who gets her Christmas shopping done early,” he teased.
She smiled. “A little, yes.” She extended one mug of coffee and he took it, lifting it to his lips. “I had a good time today, Jordan.”
When Amanda sat down on the couch, Jordan did, too. His nearness brought images from the movie they’d seen back to her mind. “So did I,” he answered, putting his coffee down on the rickety cocktail table.
Damn that guy with the ice cube, Amanda fretted to herself as Jordan put his hands on her shoulders again and slowly drew her close. It seemed to her that a small eternity passed before their lips touched, igniting the soft suspense Amanda felt into a flame of awareness.
The tip of his tongue encircled her lips, and when they parted at his silent bidding, he took immediate advantage. Somehow Amanda found herself lying down on the sofa instead of sitting up, and when Jordan finally pulled away from her mouth, she arched her neck. He kissed the pulse point at the base of her throat, then progressed to the one beneath her right ear. In the meantime, Amanda could feel her T-shirt being worked slowly up her rib cage.
When he unsnapped her bra and laid it aside, revealing her ripe breasts, Amanda closed her eyes and lifted her back slightly in a silent offering.
He encircled one taut nipple with feather-light kisses, and Amanda moaned softly when he captured the morsel between his lips and began to suckle. She entangled her hands in his hair and spread her legs, one foot high on the sofa back, the other on the floor, to accommodate him.
The eloquent pressure of his desire made Amanda ache to be taken, but she was too breathless to speak, too swept up in the gentle incursion to ask for conquering. When she felt the snap on her jeans give way, followed soon after by the zipper, she only lifted her hips so the jeans could be peeled away. They vanished, along with her panties and her sneakers, and Jordan began to caress her intimately with one hand while he enjoyed her other breast.
The ordinary light in the living room turned colors and made strange patterns in front of Amanda’s eyes as Jordan kissed his way down over her satiny, quivering belly to her thighs.
She whimpered when he burrowed into her deepest secret, gave a lusty cry when he plundered that secret with his mouth. Her hips shot upward, and Jordan cupped his hands beneath her bottom, holding her in his hands as he would sparkling water from a stream. “Jordan,” she gasped, turning her head from side to side in a fever of passion when he showed her absolutely no mercy.
He flung her over the savage brink, leaving her to convulse repeatedly at the top of an invisible geyser. When the last trace of response had been wrung from her, he lowered her gently back to the sofa.
She lay there watching him, the back of one hand resting against her mouth, her body covered in a fine mist of perspiration. Jordan was sitting up, one of her bare legs draped across his lap, his eyes gentle as he laid a hand on Amanda’s trembling belly as if to soothe it.
“I want you,” she said brazenly when she could speak.
Jordan smiled and traced the outline of her jaw with one finger, then the circumferences of both her nipples. “Not this time, Mandy,” he answered, his voice hardly more than a ragged whisper.
Amanda was both surprised and insulted. “What
