AllFreeNovel
Share Us
* * *
Over an hour later, he lifted his head from the pillow and scowled at her. “There’s no way you could have known.”
“Not for certain, but I suspected.” She stretched, feeling lazy and replete. Her entire body throbbed with a pleasant, lingering heat.
He gathered her close and pressed a kiss to the top of her head. “Six months,” he grumbled. “And it took a damn blackout to get you to talk to me.”
“I feel rather fond of the blackout,” she murmured. “Without it, I wouldn’t have been forced to spend so much time with you.”
“Are you saying we never would have worked it out if it hadn’t been for that?”
“I wouldn’t have given you the chance to get that close to me,” she said, her voice quiet with sincerity. “I wasn’t playing games, Tom. I was scared to death of you, and of losing myself again. You never would have had the chance to convince me, if it hadn’t been for the blackout.”
“Then God bless overloaded power grids,” he muttered. “But I’d have gotten to you, one way or another.”
“Other than kidnapping, I can’t think how,” she replied caustically.
He went very still, and the silence made her lift her head to give him a suspicious glare. He tried to look innocent, then gave it up when he saw she wasn’t buying it.
“That was what I had planned for the weekend, if you refused to have dinner with me Thursday night,” he admitted a bit sheepishly.
“Ah-ha. I thought you way laid me that afternoon.”
“A man has to do something when his woman won’t give him the time of day,” he muttered. “I was desperate.”
She said, “It’s six-thirty.”
A brief flicker of confusion crossed his face; then he glanced at the clock and grinned. “So it is,” he said with satisfaction. She had just given him the time of day—and a lot more. With a lithe twist of his powerful body he tumbled her back into the twisted sheets and came down on top of her.
“I love you,” he rumbled. “And I still haven’t heard the ‘yes’ I’ve been waiting for.”
“I agreed. We made a deal.”
“I know, but I’m a little more traditional than that. Elizabeth Major, will you marry me?”
She hesitated for a second. Eric Landers had lost the power to keep her a victim. “Yes, Tom Quinlan, I certainly will.”
He lowered his head to kiss her. When he surfaced, they were both breathing hard and knew it would be a while yet before they got out of bed. He gave the clock another glance. “Around nine,” he murmured, “remind me to make a couple of phone calls. I need to cancel the kidnapping plans.”
She laughed, and kept laughing until his strong thrust into her body changed the laughter into a soft cry of pleasure, as he turned that relentless focus to the task of bringing them both to the intense ecstasy they found only with each other. She had been so afraid of that part of him, but now she knew it was what made him a man she could depend on for the rest of her life. As she clung to his shoulders, a dim echo of thought floated through her brain: “God bless overloads!”
* * * * *
