Susan Phillips - Hot Shot

He gently disengaged himself and slipped off her blouse.

She wanted to give a whoop of triumph. Yes! He finally had the idea. He'd finally remembered what he was supposed to be doing. Now the bra. Don't forget the bra.

He didn't forget. His agile fingers unfastened the clasp so smoothly it seemed as if it had dissolved in his hands. He slipped the lacy garment off her and laid her down on the bed.

And then he just looked at her. She lay back and he inspected her with his eyes. Her nipples grew hard and beaded under his scrutiny. He bent forward. She closed her eyes, waiting for the heat of his mouth on her breasts, and felt his lips settle…

… over the curve of her shoulder.

She gave a little sob of frustration. Her hands knotted into fists at her side while he played with her shoulder for another ten years. My breasts! she wanted to cry. Taste my breasts, my bubbles, my pretty pretty boobies.

But the booby she had married had discovered a patch of incredibly sensitive skin at the inside of her elbow and he was sucking on it.

"Your slacks are getting mussed," he said finally.

"Yes," she agreed. "Oh, yes." She began to unfasten them, but again he pushed her away. He slipped them down over her legs and started to fold them.

"It doesn't matter," she said. "Just throw them across a chair."

"They'll get wrinkled," he replied, as if a pair of wrinkled slacks were some sort of monumental crime against nature. Standing, he held them by the cuffs, snapped the creases, and began matching up the inseams with a geometric precision that would have made Euclid weep with joy.

Paige wanted to weep, but not with joy. Why couldn't he understand how difficult it was for her to get aroused? Her excitement could vanish any second. It always did. He needed to take advantage of her arousal before it slipped away. Didn't he understand that?

Apparently he didn't. He had to carry the slacks over to the closet and hang them up. And not just any hanger would do. It had to be a trouser hanger.

She whipped off her underpants while his back was turned and lifted one knee just a bit so that the sole of her right foot was pressed against the curve of her left calf.

When he turned around and saw that, his eyes opened wider. Determined to gain the upper hand, she let one arm fall languidly to the side of the bed and began rubbing the sole of her right foot up and down her calf. Yank walked back toward the bed. She caught her bottom lip between her teeth. He abruptly took a detour.

She shot up on her elbow. "Where are you going?"

He walked over to one of the tables and flipped on another lamp. "It's hard to see in here," he said. "I like to see what I'm doing." And then he returned to the foot of the bed. Sliding his hands up and down her calves, he gently pressed her knees farther open.

Her mouth went dry. She looked up at him.

His hands rose to his shirt. But instead of taking it off, he began slowly rolling up the cuffs.

Her eyes flew to his face. For the first time, she saw the amusement lurking at the corner of his mouth.

"You're doing this on purpose," she gasped.

"I think," he said, "that no one has ever taken enough time with you."

Paige lived through a thousand glorious lives that night. Yank had been trained in the lessons of patience, and he believed in careful craftsmanship. He liked to form hypotheses and then test them. For example, if he used his tongue here and his hand there…

He was an engineer, an absolute genius when it came to working with small parts. And every one of her small parts surrendered to his intricate inspection and exploded under his skillful manipulation.

Who could have imagined he would actually have to smother her cries of fulfillment with his mouth? Who could have imagined that this absent-minded genius could bring her the satisfaction that had been eluding her all her life?

When he finally came to her, his eyes were glazed and his breathing as heavy as her own. She was hardly capable of rational thought, but she dimly realized what his patience was costing him and loved him all the more for it.

Even as he poised himself to enter her, he took care. He was her husband, her lover. But above all, he was an engineer. And good engineers never forced parts together that were of unequal size.

"All right?" he murmured.

"Oh, yes. Oh, yes," she gasped.

"My wife. My love."

She cried out with joy and passion as he entered her. He caught her cries in his mouth and they began to move together, rushing in harmony toward a place of perfect fulfillment.

As dawn streaked the sky, they lay satiated in each other's arms. "Why did you act like it would be okay if I went to bed with Mitch?" she whispered.

"Because I knew Mitch wouldn't go to bed with you."

"He would, too," she said indignantly. And then she smiled. "No, I guess he wouldn't have." Her fingers played with the textures of his chest. "I thought you loved Susannah."

He stroked her cheek. "I do. The same way you love her." He didn't see any need to tell her it hadn't always been that way, that there had been a time when he had been very much attracted to Susannah. She had been so different from the women he knew.

"Susannah's happiness is important to me," he went on.

"That's why I had to make Sam understand that he couldn't have her back. But in terms of physical attraction…"

When he didn't go on, Paige probed. "What? Tell me."

He looked troubled. "Please don't take offense at this, Paige. I love Susannah and I admire her. But don't you think she's a bit-plain?"

Paige gazed around her at the tacky wedding suite that Yank thought was so attractive. She giggled with delight and hugged him to her breasts. "Absolutely, Yank. Susannah is definitely too plain for you."

Everything about Mitch had begun to irritate Susannah. His clothes, for example. How many perfectly tailored navy-blue suits could a man own? How many navy and red rep ties? Couldn't he take a walk on the wild side just once and wear paisley?

And she hated the way he tapped his pen when he was annoyed, the way he leaned back in his chair and tugged on his necktie knot when he wanted to make a point. He took notes on absolutely everything-she hated that, too. What did he do with all those yellow legal pads once he filled them up? Did he rent a warehouse somewhere?

She fumed as she watched his gold pen scratch across the paper. He probably had one of those yellow legal pads on his bedside table so he could take notes on a woman's performance after they'd made love.

But she couldn't let herself think about that, and so she thought about how crazy he made her in meetings. They would be sitting around a conference table and he would be reading from his ten zillionth computer printout and talking about shipments and quotas and sales forecasts. Then, right in the middle of a sentence, he'd slip off those stupid horn-rimmed glasses and look over at her. Just a look. Just this macho-stud look like she was some sort of marked woman. God, it was irritating. It was so irritating, she would lose track of where she was and stumble around and then everyone would start looking at her .

"Susannah?"

She blinked her eyes. Jack Vaughan, their vice-president of Research and Development, was staring at her. Everyone was staring at her. She'd done it again. Mitch smiled and leaned back in his chair, making this stupid church steeple with his fingers.

"Susannah?" Vaughan repeated. "Do you have any questions about our figures?"

"No, no. They're fine." She suspected that everyone at the table knew she didn't have the slightest idea what figures they were talking about. A giant clock seemed to be ticking away in her head, marking this last week until her divorce was final. Why did Mitch have to be so stubborn? Why did he have to drive her crazy like this? She wasn't sleeping well at night. All of this waiting had worn her nerves to the breaking point.