Free When Somebody Loves You by Cindy Gerard Page B

experience, for Pete’s sake, and the sum total of the new information he’d discovered on the elusive Ms. Stewart was what he’d picked up before they’d left her house. She’d pay for that, he decided as he walked her to her door. She’d pay good.
    He knew her game. He’d sensed her withdraw into herself on the drive home. The fear was taking over again. He could feel it. She would tell him good night, offer a chaste kiss, and send him home to a cold shower.
    Well, he had a surprise for her. He was going to kiss her senseless as punishment for making him sing like a snitch in an Elmore Leonard novel. Then he was going to leave her with her own fire burning and let her figure out how to put it out. That would fix her.
    He hadn’t yet made his move when she very quietly, very nervously asked, “Would you like to come in?”
    He was so stunned by her invitation, he didn’t remember replying. He must have, though, because the next thing he knew, he was standing inside her foyer and she was hanging up his coat.
    “I had a wonderful time tonight,” she said breathlessly as she turned back to him.
    “Yes. It was nice, wasn’t it?” he heard himself respond in a voice that sounded like he’d just swallowed a mouthful of tacks.
    Watching her carefully, he saw her draw in a deep breath, raise her chin, and lick the last of the gloss off her lips. That innocent gesture rocked him all the way to his toes . . . and to other places he was trying desperately not to think about.
    “I—I was hoping,” she went on hesitantly, “that . . . maybe it didn’t have to end just yet.”
    He was sure he’d only imagined what she’d said, and chalked it up to delusional hysteria. But when he met her eyes and saw a glimmer of hope—or was it apprehension?—flash through their beautiful dark depths, he knew he’d heard her right. He knew what she was offering.
    It was all he’d hoped for. It was all he’d fantasized about for weeks.
    And it was all wrong.
    He wasn’t sure why, but he knew it was wrong.
    With a pinched little smile, she reached for his hand. Hers was trembling as she led him down the hall to her bedroom.
    She flipped on the light and left him frowning in the doorway as she walked to her closet, then removed her heels and hung them neatly on a shoe rack. Peripherally aware of white-upon-white decor, from the carpet to the drapes to the bedspread on the old brass bed, he watched her in a dazed state, trying to figure out what was wrong with this picture.
    “January—” he began, but stopped abruptly when she crossed the room to him, presented her back, and in a small, controlled voice asked, “Could you get this for me?”
    A man could take only so much. Intoxicated by her bold maneuver and by the scent that had been driving him crazy all night, he reached for the tab of her zipper, and, enjoying every pale, cool inch of flesh he revealed, slid the zipper down.
    Like an automaton, she slipped the dress off her shoulders and stepped out of it. He’d seen black lace and silk stockings before, but he’d never seen them on January. He swallowed hard and felt his testosterone level hit a new high.
    He’d been wrong earlier. Her legs weren’t endless. They were all pale satin skin and firm supple flesh, and they ended at the exact spot he wanted to touch and taste and claim as belonging only to him.
    She was exquisite, every man’s erotic dream. And she was his for the taking.
    He whispered her name as he spun her around and hauled her hard against him. He would have been aghast at his own lack of finesse if he hadn’t been so lost in the wildfire her mouth ignited.
    When the kiss ended, he was reeling and already working at the knot of his tie. Yet as he watched her walk calmly back to the closet, where she proceeded to hang up her dress and tuck it carefully into a garment bag, it hit him what was going on.
    What he was going to do about it was a measure of how far gone he was on this woman. He