"What about that Joe?"
"That Joe is married," she reminded him.
"But if he weren't?"
She thought about Joseph Marcus a moment, then shook her head. "We probably would have had a thing going for a while, and then it would have fizzled. He was a diversion, not an affair of the heart. Nothing serious, I assure you. I can barely remember him."
She levered herself up and combed her hands down his chest. "You, on the other hand, I'll remember. You look exactly as I imagined you would."
"You imagined me naked?"
"I confess."
"When?"
"When you first came into the store, I think. In the back of my mind, I was thinking, 'Whoa. He's yummy.' "
"I'm yummy?"
"Very yummy."
"Why, thank you, ma'am," he said, speaking in an exaggerated drawl. Eyes moving to her breasts, he added,
"You're right tasty-looking yourself."
"Oh, I'll bet you say that to all the girls who straddle your lap."
Smiling, he reached for a strand of her hair and rubbed it between his fingers. Gradually his smile relaxed, and when he spoke, his tone was more serious.
"We've been through a lot together, Tiel. A birth. A near-death. Tense hours of not knowing how it was going to play out. Trauma like that does something to people. It binds them."
His words echoed her earlier thoughts on the subject.
But it wasn't very flattering that he ascribed their attraction solely to trauma, or that he could mitigate carnal desire with such a pragmatic, scientific explanation.
What if they'd met at a cocktail party last night? There would have been no sparks, no heat, and they wouldn't be in bed together now. Essentially that's what he was saying.
If this meant nothing more to him than illustrating a psychological phenomenon, there was no sense in prolonging the inevitable goodbye.
Congratulations, Doc. You 're my first-and probably last one-night stand. One-morning stand.
She moved to get up, but he used her motion to pull her fully atop him, so that they were belly to belly and her legs were lying between his.
"In spite of the danger to us-to everyone inside the store-I had periodic and incredibly vivid fantasies of this."
She found enough voice to say, "Of this?"
His hands smoothed down her back, over her ass, and as far as they could reach along the backs of her thighs.
"Of you."
He levered up his shoulders in order to kiss her. At first the kiss was slow and methodical, his tongue leisurely stroking her mouth while his hands continued sliding up and down her back from shoulders to thighs.
She felt like purring. In fact she did. When he felt the vibration of it, the kiss intensified. His hands covered her bottom and held her tightly against his erection. Provocatively, she rocked against it. He hissed a swear word, making it sound erotic. He slid his hands down the backs of her thighs and separated them.
Then he was inside her again, a full, heavy, desired pressure.
Filling more than her body. Filling an unacknowledged need she'd had for a very long time. Giving her more than immense pleasure. Giving her a sense of fulfillment and purpose that even her finest work had failed to provide.