seemed to be plenty of time. She wasn’t even close to losing her nerve. Just her mind.
Her breasts ached when he slid down between them, slid farther down. Last time she’d noticed, she’d been wearing a skirt. What had happened to it? But a second later she was delighted it had vanished. His fingertips stroked the silk of her panties, and a few strokes later, they seemed to have disappeared, too, and his mouth moved against her stomach, down through the mound of curls, generating the white-hot heat that flamed inside her. She arched her back to make the wonderful thing he was doing to her easier for him, so easy he would never stop, not even when, eventually, she begged him to.
But that moment never came, while Blythe did, over and over, crazed by the touch of his tongue, his lips, his smooth, firm fingertips, until at last she had ripped his black briefs off his body and convinced him to thrust himself inside her.
The resulting frenzy of mutual plundering left them crossways on the bed, her straddling him, his head and feet hanging off. As he pounded into her, she flipped them over so that he was on top. He thrust into her again and propelled them into the footboard, which obligingly fell off. They crashed to the floor on top of it.
From beneath them came the unmistakable sound of a broom handle knocking against the ceiling of the apartment below, the universal sign to quiet down. It distracted her just enough to allow a fleeting concern that Max was still conscious, but all her senses told her the only part of him she cared about at the moment still plunged into her and withdrew, plunged and withdrew. If it was merely a neurological impulse at work, she didn’t care; it felt just as good. If he stopped, then she’d worry about restoring him to consciousness.
But he didn’t stop, didn’t even pause. A driving force built up more intensely inside her with each thrust. She was going to explode. With a shriek, she did, spasms shaking her from head to toe, tentative at first, then escalating so ferociously that she collapsed against him, wet with sweat, having barely enough energy left to observe that he still had plenty.
“The footboard wasn’t holding up anything structural, was it?” His voice was rough, although his mouth wasn’t as it nibbled at her neck. “We’ll resume play on the field.”
She emitted a small moan of protest as he rolled himself off the flattened footboard, picked her up in his arms and deposited her onto the tangled sheets. His skin was hot. “You’re burning up,” she said, stroking his chest. “You need to cool off.”
“Someday.” His arms tightened around her.
“I have an idea,” she whispered, sliding out of bed, feeling him try to tug her back.
“A kinky one?”
“I have a personal fan,” Blythe said, starting to search the darkness of her closet.
“Me.”
She turned to direct a smile at him, even though she knew he couldn’t see it. “Thank you,” she said. “You’re going to be a bigger fan in a minute.”
“I’m already a bigger fan. Come back to bed.”
But she’d found the battery-operated fan and turned it on herself as she took it back to the night table. “There. How’s that?”
“Ahh, ohh,” he moaned, and he must have stretched out his arms and legs directly out to his sides, because when she tried to climb in beside him, the only room in the bed was on top of him. “A dream come true.”
“Uh-huh,” she said as she settled herself over him, melting like frosting on a hot cake.
3
AT SOME POINT IN THE LONG, lovely night, Blythe made tuna fish sandwiches, which they fed to each other in bed. During another brief respite, Max limped to the kitchen in search of the cookie tin. When the fan ran out of battery power, they opened all the windows and took a cold shower together, Blythe’s puckered nipples warming to the heat of Max’s chest and his arousal undiminished by the icy spray.
There were forays for water, forays for fortifying fruit juices, but mainly there were forays into each other until, at last, too exhausted and sated to care about the stray bits of tuna fish and chocolate chunks, Blythe fell asleep in midkiss.
When she woke up, Max was propped up on one elbow, gazing down at her in a brightly lit room.
“Electricity?” she murmured sleepily, trying to burrow back into the hollow of his shoulder.
“Sun,” he said, his voice low and warm. “It’s after ten o’clock.” His fingertip trailed lazily over her bare stomach, and Blythe instinctively tried to make her navel touch her tailbone. “How do you feel?”
“Fantastic. How do you feel?”
He hesitated a moment, still tracing her skin. “Fantastic…and surprised.”
Blythe frowned into his shoulder. “What kind of surprise? Good surprise? Bad surprise?” He’d mentioned that in Candy’s phone call, Blythe had sounded like a person with a lot of nerve, and admittedly, she’d put all the nerve she had into last night, but what if he’d expected more assertiveness? More imaginative ideas? More leather? Some, anyway?
There was a raspy chuckle in his voice. “Good surprise. Definitely. I mean, I’d hoped this would happen. You have to admit I came prepared.”
“For an orgy,” she muttered, thinking of the endless supply of condoms he’d reached for during the night, “but of course, a person in your position would have taken extra precautions. Besides, they were probably tax-deductible. Or maybe you get them free from salesmen.”
He gave her an odd look. “Why would I get them free?”
“Because tonight, or last night, was business-related.”
He found a bit of chocolate on her ear and licked it off, making her shiver. “I suppose you could call it business-related.”
She grew very still. “Did it feel like more than business to you?” The words came timidly. “Because it did to me.”
He buried his face in her neck. “It had nothing to do with business. In fact, if we’re going to be working together, we have to keep this totally separate from business or I won’t get any work done.”
For the first time, Blythe felt that something might be a little bit wrong. She came fully awake.
“Yeah.” He was talking to himself now and sounding nostalgic. “When you called—”
But she hadn’t called him. Candy had.
“—and offered to welcome me personally to New York—”
Blythe stiffened. Ooh. A whole lot wrong.
“—I asked Bart about you and he said—”
How did he know Bart?
“‘Candy Jacobsen? It should be quite a welcome.’ So Bart’s already expecting hanky-panky in the office and it would be a shame to disappoint—”
Blythe spun into a sitting position before she interrupted him. She
