be the slightest bit jealous, especially since she’d yet to see him naked after ten months of dating. Instead, he’d sounded surprised, but added that he wasn’t the jealous type. He trusted her, for heaven’s sake—how patronizing. “Asking him was the considerate thing to do.”
“It was the pathetic thing to do. The man doesn’t own your orgasms.”
You’re telling me.
“Besides, what the heck else are you going to do tonight?”
Sleep sounded good, but Georgia recognized the early signs of insomnia by now and knew she’d be wide-eyed most of the night. She floundered for a chore that sounded remotely engrossing. “Program numbers into my new phone.”
Toni scoffed. “Which will take all of ten minutes.”
“Not for the gadgetronically challenged like myself.”
“Pshaw. I’ll expect you at my place in one hour. Show some skin and bring plenty of one-dollar bills.”
Georgia mumbled goodbye, then frowned at the handset, searching for a disconnect button. These newfangled portable models would make slamming down the phone obsolete. Not that she was the slamming sort, but at thirty, she expected many character-building experiences ahead of her and it seemed prudent to keep relevant props nearby. Fumbling for a button would not have the same impact.
At last she hit the Talk button, surprised when she heard the resulting dial tone. Her confidence bolstered, she pushed the programming button and after a few minutes of jockeying with arrow keys, managed to enter the numbers of the people or places she dialed most often: Rob, Toni, her mother, her sister, the personnel office at the hospital, various friends, the pizza delivery place, the Thai delivery place, the Chinese delivery place and the Mexican delivery place. Then she jotted down the names and corresponding two-digit numbers on the little pullout tablet on the base station, the most impressive doohickey on the entire gizmo, in her opinion.
Georgia wiped the perspiration from her forehead with the hem of her T-shirt. Was it her imagination, or was her apartment the hottest spot north of the Equator? From her vantage point, she could see the blasted programmable thermostat in the hall. The building manager had reset it for her three times and the place still felt like a sauna. Oh, well, she’d look for that instruction manual tomorrow—she might be on a technological roll, but she didn’t want to push her luck tonight. Besides, sweating was good for the pores.
She leaned her head back on a stiff cushion, thinking how much she’d grown to loathe the beige sectional sofa. Two years ago she accepted her registered nurse’s position in emergency medicine. When she had first moved to Birmingham, Alabama, leaving behind her mother and sister, she’d bought ultramodern living room furniture for her apartment as a symbol of her newfound independence. Soon, however, she’d come to realize that the harsh lines and drab colors were less than friendly when settling in to watch a classic romantic movie. On the other hand, Rob said he found her furniture a welcome change from the flowery styles preferred by most women.
Georgia smirked, thinking that Rob’s preference for furniture could also describe his preference for sex—the man was a minimalist. A heartbeat later, she regretted the thought because Rob Trainer was a hardworking, ambitious accounting consultant and a consummate Southern gentleman. Well, maybe consummate was an unfortunate word choice.
An overhead stretch to pull her tired shoulders turned into a full-body yawn. Her insomnia, combined with Rob’s gentlemanly ways, was testing her physical endurance, which was precisely why she’d prefer to skip the party at the male strip club. She pulled a hand down over her face, trying to squash the provocative images swirling in her mind, and the quickening in her thighs. She’d never been to a strip club, but she had a bad, bad feeling that such a place would only fuel the flame in her belly she was trying desperately to smother.
She pushed herself to her feet and strolled the perimeter of her living room, opening windows to let in air an nth degree less stagnant than the air inside her tiny third-floor apartment. Thick and pungent, the evening wafted indoors. Street noises rose up to lure her outside—revving engines and bright lights and blaring horns and booming stereos, scantily dressed women laughing and calling to men driving convertibles and straddling motorcycles. Everyone was in search of sex on this hot, southern night.
Including Georgia Arletta Adams.
She sighed and pressed her nose against the window screen. Even people close to her would be shocked if they knew that she, Nurse Goody-Two-Shoes and everybody’s little sister, suffered from her own private affliction: a breathing, burning, pulsing, vigorous, distracting, overblown sex drive.
She stopped short of calling herself a nymphomaniac because she wasn’t promiscuous. In fact, she had a reputation for being a bit of a prude, which, she’d discovered years ago, was an effective safeguard against a dangerous tendency. She had simply refused to bend to the will of her restless body.
Oh, there’d been a couple of unremarkable encounters with other grad students in college, and one or two brief relationships since. But the men hadn’t excited her, hadn’t tapped into her secret garden.
Georgia walked to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door, sighing with relief when the cool air hit her skin. She lifted the tail of her T-shirt to cool her stomach, then removed a banana from the crisper to munch while her refrigerator worked overtime.
She eyed the banana and sighed—everything looked phallic these days. She bit off the end and fanned her shirt. By immersing herself in work, she’d managed for the most part to keep a lid on her powerful urges…until a year ago. Then, triggered by either the surge of hormones most women experience in their early thirties, or years of repression, or this damnable relentless southern heat, her body had launched a quiet rebellion.
Georgia had always assumed she would marry one day, but she’d stepped up her efforts to find Mr. Right, thinking that exploring her fermenting sexuality would at least be safer within the confines of a monogamous relationship. Rob Trainer had seemed like the perfect candidate: handsome and successful, well-mannered and reflective, intelligent and friendly. She liked him immensely. But after investing the past several months in their relationship, she had come to one conclusion: the man had no interest in sleeping with her.
She was ripe for the picking, and he seemed content to walk around the tree.
And, if truth be known, it was more than the sex she craved—it was the closeness, the intimacy generated when two loving people shared sex. The tingly “you complete me” stuff she saw in movies but observed between too few couples these days. If the specter of true love still existed, she wanted it. Matchless love, not the desolate, co-dependent relationship her parents had passed off as a marriage. She wanted a man who would lower his guard, a man who would make a fool out of himself for her, a man who would cherish her.
Georgia sighed and fanned herself. Meanwhile, that inner rebellion was now reaching cataclysmic proportions. During her nursing studies, she’d read documented cases of spontaneous combustion. At the rate her internal furnace was stoking, and with no end in sight to the scorching summer heat wave, she feared she might be approaching flashpoint.
She finished the banana, and reluctantly closed the refrigerator door, then studied the deep crimson pedicure on which she’d splurged in the feeble hope that Rob nursed a foot fetish. But last night he hadn’t even blinked when she’d worn her new strappy high heels. Instead he’d warned her about falling and breaking her neck, then suggested that she double-check her disability insurance coverage and kissed her on the cheek. She’d never thought of herself as the kind of woman who would end a relationship because the guy wouldn’t
