why did you call?”
“We’re shooting in San Francisco next week, and I was wondering if you’d want to come on the show.”
Ca-ching! Mercedes squeezed her fingers on the towel to keep from squealing. Never a smooth move. He wanted her on the show? Not the perfect audience for erotica, but hey, she wasn’t going to complain, with her book just hitting the shelves. Mercedes did a short happy dance before regaining her poise. “What day were you thinking?”
“We’d have you on Thursday night. Fly you out there on Thursday, fly back on Friday. The show would pick up the tab.”
Such mundane words, in such a lustrous voice. Soft, intimate, infinitely warm. Jeez, he was talking travel arrangements and she was getting seduced. “What do you want to talk about?” she asked, trying to keep all those seduce-me fixations out of her brain.
“It’s only a short segment. The meat of the program is going to a judicial scholar who just published a book on the Ninth Circuit’s influence on the Supreme Court, so we’d only have about ten minutes. The topic would be how the white noise of sexual messages is negatively affecting the libido.”
“I’m assuming that I’m the face of the sexual white noise?” she asked dryly, no longer full of seduce-me fixations.
“Uh, yeah. Not me.”
She sighed heavily into the phone, disappointed because, well, she didn’t want to analyze why she was disappointed that Sam Porter wasn’t murmuring erotic nothings over the phone.
“You’ll do it?” he asked.
Like she would say no. “You’ll send me the travel arrangements?”
“Charlie’s assistant will call you.”
“Thank you for thinking of me, Sam.”
“It wasn’t hard. You’re not easy to forget.”
Mercedes pumped a fist into the air. “Twelve months is a long time to sit idly by.”
“Yeah, congratulations, by the way,” he said, easily slipping back to his smooth, melodious television voice. No intimacy, all professional.
“For what?”
“The book.”
“You knew?”
“I do read.”
“You read it?” she asked, not bothering to hide the surprise. Sam’s political leanings didn’t lend themselves to erotica. Damn it.
“No, but I have been spotted in bookstores before, Mercedes.”
“You don’t approve, do you?”
“It’s not my place to approve or disapprove. Free country. Free speech. That’s what makes America great.”
She laughed softly, sensing the truth. “You hate it.”
“No. Honestly.”
He was a liar. But what was the point in calling him on it? “How are you doing? The show’s ratings are through the roof.”
“You noticed?”
“I do watch TV.”
“My show?”
“Sometimes,” she answered, not wanting to tell him that she taped his show and watched it before bed. She liked listening to him at night, and his opinions weren’t that kooky. At least most of the time. Sometimes, when she was really, really tired, she even agreed with him. But she would never tell him that.
“I need to go. Thanks for doing this.”
“Sure.” Mercedes hung up the phone, and returned to the bathroom. The water was cool to the touch, so she ran a brand-new tubfull, making it warm and soothing. She touched herself again, her fingers taking up where they had left off, and she returned to the dark, mysterious world where her lovers resided. But this time, her lover had a face and a voice.
Hazel green eyes, firm lips, a nose that looked like it’d been broken once, and silky, tawny brown hair that fell any way but straight.
As she slipped into the last wake of her climax, she thought of Sam and smiled.
BERGEN COUNTY, NEW JERSEY, was as close to nature as a man could be, yet still be less than thirty minutes from Manhattan. Sam owned three shaded acres of towering Douglas firs, and grass growing as it was meant to be, not trimmed into some geometrical hoodoo. His office was in the back of the house, where he could watch Max, his black lab happily chase squirrels. At the moment, instead of chasing squirrels, Max was happily snoozing, leaving Sam to his own thoughts.
A man with an MA, BA and BBA, shouldn’t be thinking of T & A when contemplating his livelihood. He was a professional, a man who’d been yelled at, threatened, and yes, hit once, on national television, and never, ever lost his cool. He could think of a million and one reasons why he shouldn’t be asking Mercedes to San Francisco. Number one. He was too old for her. He was thirty-nine, and she was a young twenty-something. That age when the world was full of opportunity and birthdays were still celebrated. Sam wasn’t old by any means, but he’d seen it, he’d done it, and he’d settled into a comfortable existence that didn’t involve nightlife and a tingling anticipation of tomorrow. For God’s sake, he had a recliner. Twenty-somethings didn’t date men with recliners.
And the reasons didn’t stop there. She wrote erotic fiction. Not children’s books, not historical fiction, not self-help books. Well, if you really wanted to split hairs, you could consider erotic fiction self-help, but Sam wasn’t a hair-splitter. He believed in facts. Honor, responsibility, not just s-e-x, the consummation of a man and woman, bodies entwined together, lost in the mindless passion of the moment, possibly in a recliner.
Why now? Was he approaching a midlife crisis before he hit forty? He’d always been mature for his age, maybe this was just early onset midlife crisis. And did he want to have sex with Mercedes merely to satisfy some arbitrary whim to have a young, hot babe on his arm. God, he didn’t even like the word “babe”—or the men who said it.
He swore and Max, his black Lab, lifted his head from the rug and stared.
“What are you staring at?” snapped Sam.
Max turned his head and whined.
“I know it’s not smart, Max. But let me work through this. I’ll have one night, maybe two. Just to get it out of my system. Then I’ll come back, trade in the Lexus on a bright red Ferrari. Like I’m supposed to.”
Max cocked his head.
“You can ride in the front seat, the wind blowing through your ears. It’ll be just like in the movies. A man and his dog. You got to back me up on this. Tell me I can be strong.”
Max barked at him, and Sam smiled. Of course, then he picked up Mercedes’s book and started to read again.
Thursday night couldn’t come soon enough.
THEY’D
