Kathleen O'Reilly - Hot Under Pressure

“You could think?” he asked, his eyes narrowed. “I couldn’t think. Why could you think?”

“Not then. Now.”

He rapped a hand against his heart. “Good.” Then he looked at her in that way she was learning to recognize. “Do you honestly believe all that?” he asked seriously. There were two David McLeans. One, resident goofball, but the other was hardcore analyst. He was probably excellent at his job.

“I think it deserves some consideration,” she replied, but honestly, she did believe it. It explained everything.

And he didn’t look at her like a crazy person, which made her like him more. “Okay, meet me in L.A. In a hotel room. Chateau Marmont. We can be Mr. and Mrs. Jones. We’ll test your theory.”

“We’d just…exchange a room number and then I knock three times on the door, and…?”

“Yeah, or we could just meet up in the lobby,” he explained in a practical voice.

Ashley sighed. “It’s easy to tell you’re Mr. Bottom Line. No sense of adventure at all.”

“This from a woman in bunny slippers?”

She held up a naked foot. “Not a pink floppy ear in sight.”

His eyes crinkled. “Bare flesh. Seductress.”

“You think?” She held up her foot again, watching one of his long, lean thighs dig itself into the covers until it was buried completely. She was going to miss that naked thigh, that firm flank, that stellar ass.

“You have very sexy feet. I was watching them on the plane.”

Feet? No. It would have been better if he were a serial killer.

“You think my feet are sexy? You’re not gonna get weird and suck toes, are you?”

He must have some flaw. This one would explain it.

Thankfully, he looked horrified. “No. But I could, you know, start at the arch, work my way up, see where I land…” And she could see the gears turning in his head…all because of a foot. Her foot.

Ashley stared at the appendage of interest, considering the possibilities. “That sounds…decadent.”

“Bam?” he asked, raising a brow.

“Definitely.”

“Good. I didn’t push any buttons before, and I’m sorry about that, but you felt so good. I got carried away, and I feel like I have shirked my manly duties.”

She wiggled her toes. “Go forth, and unshirk, my devoted slave of pleasure.”

He pushed down her body, and his mouth pressed against her arch, and the first time it tickled, causing her to giggle. But then he moved up her calf, and it still tickled, but a different tickle. A warm tickle, a tickle between her thighs.

“Oh,” murmured Ashley, then she shot upright, horrified by a new thought. “You have more condoms?”

“A whole box. Now let me get back to my unshirking.”

Ashley fell back against the pillows, and his mouth touched the inside of her thigh, and there were no more giggles. Only the sighs and ragged breathing of a woman having her buttons pushed. Every single one of them. Sometimes twice.

“I’m very glad you went for the box, rather than the travel size,” she told him.

“Bam?” he whispered, his mouth unshirking behind her knee, and moving north at a steady, yet wholly orgasm-inducing speed.

Ash, you’re way too easy.

Shut up, Val.

THEY HAD GONE through four more condoms, and the 5:00 a.m. wake-up call hadn’t even been necessary.

Ashley was dog tired. She hadn’t been this tired in years. Thirty-two-year-old women did not stay up all night having sex with strange men in airport hotel rooms.

Or at least not every day of the year.

“We can’t do this again,” she told him, her face buried in the pillow.

He chuckled, an exhausted chuckle, but a chuckle nonetheless. “Eighteen was a long time ago. You can sleep on the plane. I can sleep on the plane. I need to sleep on the plane.”

She lifted her head from the pillow. “We shouldn’t do this again.”

Comprehension dawned. “Oh.” He waited for more of an explanation. Ashley gathered her meager, yet dog-tired courage.

“Tonight was fun. Like being somebody whose life I’ve secretly always envied. But if we go out to dinner, or meet in a hotel, I’m afraid I’ll lose this fantasy, get embroiled in the completely weary minutia of my life, and I’d rather end on the high note.”

“That’s a very defeatist attitude.”

“No, sometimes things are just too good to take a chance and possibly ruin,” she told him bluntly.

“Do you ever get to New York?” he asked, a totally unfair question, because fashion, New York? Hello? Did he honestly think she was that bad at what she did?

“Sometimes. A bit. You ever come to Chicago?”

“Not if I can help it,” he answered, a defeatist attitude if she ever heard one.

“This was fun,” she repeated, rising from the ashes of the bed. Outside, the windows started to rattle again. The airport was waking up. She walked to the shower, femme fatale of the friendly skies, and she felt muscles that she didn’t know she had.

He watched her closely, and she gave her hips an extra wiggle.

“I could help you,” he offered gallantly.

“In the shower?”

He lay there naked, on his back, head pillowed on his hands. Long, lean, and ready to go. Dog tired? Who said she was dog tired?

You did.

“Come on, Yankee-man,” she ordered in a husky voice she didn’t even know she possessed.

And she didn’t have to ask twice.

LATER ON, they didn’t talk to each other on the plane. The 6:00 a.m. flight to L.A. was crowded, but thankfully, Junior and the doting parents from hell were absent. Ashley was stuffed next to a plumbing salesman from Portland who wanted to chat. She pulled out her magazines and pretended to be interested in the latest fall forecast, but instead, her sandpaper eyes kept tracking to the front of the plane. Seat 16A to be exact, where she could see the back of his head. A perfect bed-head, neatly combed into place.

It had taken her two hours to dare to stroke his hair, smooth it the way it longed to be smoothed, and she could still feel it, the fine strands tickling her fingers, still smell the shampoo and soap. Still smell the sex.

Don’t get there, Ash. Not with you-know-who sitting next to you.

Ashley stopped gawking at Seat 16A and instead focused on the magazine spreads in front of her, but her eyelids drifted shut.

She woke up three hours later, having slept through the flight. In her lap was a small white piece of paper. A business card.

David McLean.

Brooks Capital.

Analyst.

On the back, in firm, decisive, indelible black ink was scrawled a cell number and one word.

Anytime.

It was enough to make her not-quite-jaded-enough divorcée’s heart sigh.

Carefully she put the card in her wallet, hidden right behind her driver’s license. It was her memento, a souvenir she would never forget. Some moments were best not to be repeated…except while dreaming.

CHICAGO WAS WARM, windy, and loud. Ashley took a cab back to the Larsen house in Naperville, which was equally warm, not so windy and not nearly so loud. Their street was lined with towering elm trees, hand-painted mailboxes and well-used bicycles. It wasn’t New York, certainly not Los Angeles, but it was home.

Already Ashley began to feel revived.

After the divorce, she’d moved in with Val, their mother, Joyce, and Val’s daughter, Brianna. Three generations of Larsen women sharing one roof. A scary thought, all those hormonal fluctuations duking it out with the inherent uncertainty of the family genes. Frank Larsen, the ne’er-do-well who had sired Ashley and Valerie, was now on his fourth marriage, electing to spend his golden years with his twentysomething secretary in Malibu.