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Jane found it oddly soothing to enter a house with the lights already on. Homer the cat greeted her at the door with a yowl. She’d forgotten to feed him that morning, she realized then. Great—all the craziness with Luke had even turned her into a bad-cat mom.
She fed the cat, wandered around the house switching off unnecessary lights, and then slumped on the sofa, completely frazzled. The night stretched before her like an endless jail sentence. So she did what any writer would do—she went to her computer.
A minute later her office was aglow in the light of her laptop. She logged on to her e-mail account and downloaded seventeen messages. Most looked like letters from readers, another few were junk mail, one was a forwarded joke from her great-uncle Millard, and two were from Heather about the bridesmaid dresses. Jane couldn’t bring herself to open any of them. Instead, she found herself wondering what Luke’s e-mail address was, and whether he’d check it tonight.
She had to stop thinking about him. She opened the document that contained her work-in-progress, Sex and Sensibility, and realized she was the least qualified person on earth to write that book. Its subtitle, How to Be a Twenty-first-Century Girl with Nineteenth-Century Values glared at her from the screen.
She was not that girl.
Panic seized her chest. Would she have to abandon the entire project, break her contract with the publisher and ruin her writing career? She certainly couldn’t keep writing about issues like abstinence and self-control while she was in a lust-induced frenzy over her bodyguard.
Her life was spiraling out of control, and all she could think about at that moment was her weekend spent with Luke. What she needed was to regain a bit of her former mind-set. Prior to the day she met Luke Nicoletti, she’d been a different woman. She’d had sensible desires.
Of course! All she needed to do was to get her mind back on Bradley, and she’d forget all about Luke. She closed her eyes and tried to summon up a picture of Bradley. Blond hair cut meticulously short—none of that rebellious long, silken hair… Hair that tickled her face when he kissed her, when he made love to her—
Stop it!
Okay, back to Brad. Skip the hair. There was always his face. His face that, that…that she couldn’t picture right now if her life depended on it. Well then, she just needed to go back and imagine how they’d first met, in college Psych 203. The course had been titled Social Psychology, and… She couldn’t remember a damn thing about it—or Bradley—right now.
Jane propped her elbows on the desk, buried her face in her hands, and sighed. She was so incredibly horny, so in need of release, there was only one way to get past it and get herself thinking clearly again.
Her hand slipped down between her legs, giving the slightest bit of pressure to her throbbing core. No, she couldn’t do this, not with that damn manuscript title glaring at her. She closed Sex and Sensibility, then stared at her e-mail again. Then she remembered Luke’s business card, sitting on her desk only inches away, and it suddenly became very important that she touch that one little possession of his.
She found it in her business card file and pulled it out, let her fingers glide over the black raised lettering on the white card—Lucas Nicoletti, Personal Security Specialist. And that was when she saw it—his e-mail address, printed there clear as day.
She could e-mail him. Maybe give him a little taste of the torture he’d inflicted on her by not coming home with her. Yes, that was what she would do.
She opened a new message, typed in his address, then tabbed to the subject header. She typed in “A Bedtime Story,” then tabbed down to the message field.
Once upon a time there was a woman who was wide awake on a lonely Monday night. She couldn’t banish from her mind thoughts of a certain man, a man who’d brought her unimaginable pleasure only the day before. But tonight, he’d gone home alone too, and she wondered if his body ached for her the same way hers ached for him.
She lay awake, haunted by images of what they might have been doing if only they’d been together. She would take him to her bed, explore his flesh with her hands and mouth, find all the places that made him cry out with pleasure. She already knew a few of those places. She knew the feel of him, hard and throbbing inside her mouth, or buried deep inside her.
She longed for that feeling again, had a burning need for it, and when she finally fell asleep, she feverishly dreamed about it, about him, about the magic their bodies worked together.
Jane stopped and reread what she’d written. Not the most inspired prose she’d ever penned. And not in a million years could she ever actually send such a message. She wasn’t sure what she’d intended to write to Luke, but this wasn’t it. No, she’d just delete the whole thing.
