When The Lights Go Out...

“Oh, I didn’t mean you should take me to dinner,” Blythe assured him. “Just to bed.”

She felt the jolt of his body in the shoulder that brushed against hers. He whipped around to stare at her, his eyes wide. His drink slipped out of his hand and landed in his lap.

Blythe shrieked.

He leaped up, shaking his jeans loose from his crotch, while ice cubes hit the coffee table and the floor with a clatter.

“I’m so sorry,” Blythe cried. “What did I say that upset you?” She fumbled her way into the kitchen and took a stack of dish towels out of a drawer. She really didn’t need to ask. Now that he’d met her, he wasn’t interested in going to bed with her. She followed the candlelight back into the living room and clapped the towels against his wet trousers. A sound curled up from his throat, something between, “aargh“ and “aiiiee,” followed by a muttered, “I’ll take care of it, thanks.”

Realizing she was hanging on to a rather personal part of him, Blythe let him take over the towels and backed away, feeling even more miserable, inept and undesirable. Her shoulders slumped. “You don’t want to go to bed with me, right?”

“Wrong.”

“It’s okay. I understand. Nobody…What did you say?”

Silently he mopped at his trousers for another moment, then dropped the towels on the coffee table. Turning to her, he curled his hands around her shoulders. His eyes sparked in the dim light as he gazed down at her and said, “I can’t think of anything I’d rather do than make love with you.”

MAX HAD A STRONG FEELING he was missing a link in the conversational chain, but he was in no mood to go looking for it. Not accept a gift handed to him by the power outage, fate itself? Not want to go to bed with a small, artistically rounded, redheaded, freckled—

Because now, in the candlelight, he could see her just fine, and she was the most huggable woman he’d ever imagined making love to. Her hair was, in fact, red, curly and out of control. He wondered if that faint smattering of freckles covered her whole body. His brain responded to the vision, sending a jet of sudden desire straight to his crotch.

Yes, he’d be happy to go to bed with her. More than happy. Enthusiastic.

Under certain conditions.

“Really?” she said to him, breaking into his thoughts. “You really want to go to bed with me? You’re not just saying what you think you’re supposed to say?” She wore the most hopeful expression he’d ever seen on a human being.

It was a weird conversation, especially coming from a woman who’d sounded confident to the point of being a ballbuster on the telephone, but that hopeful expression got to him. “Really,” he assured her. “Couldn’t be more real. A totally genuine feeling. One with visible physical symptoms.” He’d probably gone far enough in that direction with someone he barely knew. “But I thought—well, I thought we’d spend a little time getting acquainted first.”

He had to throw that in. The voice of his conscience was nagging relentlessly at him. He knew the pitfalls of sleeping with a co-worker, of mixing business with pleasure, plus in this case, he had to make sure she was sane and capable of making judgment calls before he rushed her off to bed. “You know. The old who, what, when, where and why.” He smiled, making the point that they were both journalists, the only thing they had in common as far as he knew. “You tell me about your job and your family, the dog you had growing up, then I tell you about…”

“I can see how a person in your profession would feel that way,” she said to the underside of his chin. Her voice sounded soft and breathless, but not in the least suggestive, and the words tumbled out. Even more amazingly, her hands, light and deft, fluttered back and forth along his arms in a way that was effectively punching his conscience in the gut. “But I didn’t have a dog, and I do have a serious need to rush. The time is at hand. I need to get it over with before I lose my nerve. Unless, of course, you’re too tired.”

He’d never felt less tired in his life. This was the kind of situation a teenage kid dreamed about finding himself in, but Max wasn’t a teenage kid anymore. He knew in his heart she was reacting to fatigue, fear and uncertainty. He’d heard that people caught in life-and-death situations had sex with each other when they wouldn’t otherwise have thought of doing anything so impulsive. Maybe the power outage was having the same effect on her. He tilted her face up to give it another once-over. Her skin felt like cream to the touch. This close, in the light of the flickering candles, he could see that her eyes were green, a light, bright green, the color of new leaves in the spring. She was a little tense, a little nervous, but she seemed sane enough.

His heart rate sped up. “People are so different in person,” he said hoarsely and with difficulty. “That phone call left me thinking you were a lady with plenty of nerve.” He replayed the “welcome you to New York” call in his head and tried to relate it to the woman who was currently turning his temperature up to Broil. But he didn’t try very hard because that had been a phone call, and this woman was a tangible, embraceable fact.

Or he’d asphyxiated in the elevator and had gone to heaven. Either one was fine with him.

“Forget the phone call,” she said with a sigh that tickled his throat. “You shouldn’t believe anything you hear in that kind of phone call. The truth is, I barely have enough nerve to cross the street on a Don’t Walk sign.” Her eyes shifted away. “Can we just do it?” she asked him. “Fast?”

He’d done his best to behave responsibly, but he wasn’t campaigning for sainthood. This time when he swept her up into his arms, she felt as light as cotton candy. Her tiny squeal only intensified the suddenly purposeful sensations thudding through his body. “Yes and no,” he said, carrying her toward the promising-looking door ahead of him.

“The other way,” she said, trying to whirl him back around behind the sofa. “What do you mean, yes and no?”

Keeping a tight grip on her, he changed direction, shoved a door open, gratefully observed a sea of white that showed up even in the near-darkness and laid her down on it.

“Yes, we can do it. Just not fast.” Sinking down beside her, he moved his mouth across hers tentatively, no more than brushing her lips, seeking their shape and form. They were full, firm, warm, sweet—and already opening to his touch.

The kiss knifed into him so deeply he wanted to groan, but he couldn’t. She’d seized him too tightly, her hands working his nape and her mouth seeking his with unmistakable hunger.

That did it. He told his conscience to take note of the obviously consensual nature of this event and to go to its own room at once, and then he accepted the kiss and returned it in full measure.

WAS IT POSSIBLE THAT HER dream of being a desired, beloved wife and mother might actually come true? Not with this man, unfortunately, who was just her therapist, but was she alluring after all, capable of attracting a man who would make the dream a reality?

Two long years of nothing, which included, of course, the year with Sven, which was worse than nothing, because she had someone who was doing nothing. And here, at last, was a lifeline. Max must be an incredibly well-educated psychiatrist because he could kiss like no man she’d ever kissed, which admittedly hadn’t been many, but she suspected she could kiss a thousand men and not enjoy it any more than she was enjoying this kiss, starting with the first electrical shock of contact. His mouth feathered over hers, then the two of them drew together with the inevitability of magnets. She shivered when his tongue flicked into the corners of her mouth and then tentatively moved inside her. The sensation whipped through her body, knocking out her ability to think or reason.

She writhed against him, dizzied by waves of pure animal wanting. She slid her hands around his neck to steady herself, then across his shoulders, down his back. Feeling his muscles clench beneath her touch only made her dizzier. His hands went to her waist, tugged her T-shirt upward and, with it, the camisole she wore beneath. It seemed absolutely essential to get him out of his clothes, too, but when she felt his lips against her bare breast, she lost interest in everything except what he was doing to her, outside and in.

His lips demanded and promised, took and gave. Her head fell back, and with a moan she resigned herself to savoring the feel of them, the sensations in her breasts as he caressed them, circling her nipples with his tongue, then tugging them into his mouth. There suddenly seemed to be plenty of time. She wasn’t even close to losing her nerve. Just her mind.

Her breasts ached when he slid down between them, slid farther down. Last time she’d noticed, she’d been wearing a skirt. What had happened to it? But a second later she was delighted it had vanished. His fingertips stroked the silk of her panties, and a few strokes later, they seemed to have disappeared, too, and his mouth moved against her stomach, down through the mound of curls, generating the white-hot heat that flamed inside her. She arched her back to make the wonderful thing he was doing to her easier for him, so easy he would never stop, not even when, eventually, she begged him to.

But that moment never came, while Blythe did, over and over, crazed by the touch of his tongue, his lips, his smooth, firm fingertips, until at last she had ripped his black briefs off his body and convinced him to thrust himself inside her.

The resulting frenzy of mutual plundering left them crossways on the bed, her straddling him, his head and feet hanging off. As he pounded into her, she flipped them over so that he was on top. He thrust into her again and propelled them into the footboard, which obligingly fell off. They crashed to the floor on top of it.

From beneath them came the unmistakable sound of a broom handle knocking against the ceiling of the apartment below, the universal sign to quiet down. It distracted her just enough to allow a fleeting concern that Max was still conscious, but all her senses told her the only part of him she cared about at the moment still plunged into her and withdrew, plunged and withdrew. If it was merely a neurological impulse at work, she didn’t care; it felt just as good. If he stopped, then she’d worry about restoring him to consciousness.

But he didn’t stop, didn’t even pause. A driving force built up more intensely inside her with each thrust. She was going to explode. With a shriek, she did, spasms shaking her from head to toe, tentative at first, then escalating so ferociously that she collapsed against him, wet with sweat, having barely enough energy left to observe that he still had plenty.

“The footboard wasn’t holding up anything structural, was it?” His voice was rough, although his mouth wasn’t as it nibbled at her neck. “We’ll resume play on the field.”

She emitted a small moan of protest as he rolled himself off the flattened footboard, picked her up in his arms and deposited her onto the tangled sheets. His skin was hot. “You’re burning up,” she said, stroking his chest. “You need to cool off.”

“Someday.” His arms tightened around her.

“I have an idea,” she whispered, sliding out of bed, feeling him try to tug her back.

“A kinky one?”

“I have a personal fan,” Blythe said, starting to search the darkness of her closet.

“Me.”

She turned to direct a smile at him, even though she knew he couldn’t see it. “Thank you,” she said. “You’re going to be a bigger fan in a minute.”

“I’m already a bigger fan. Come back to bed.”

But she’d found the battery-operated fan and turned it on herself as she took it back to the night table. “There. How’s that?”

“Ahh, ohh,” he moaned, and he must have stretched out his arms and legs directly out to his sides, because when she tried to climb in beside him, the only room in the bed was on top of him. “A dream come true.”

“Uh-huh,” she said as she settled herself over him, melting like frosting on a hot cake.

3

AT SOME POINT IN THE LONG, lovely night, Blythe made tuna fish sandwiches, which they fed to each other in bed. During another brief respite, Max limped to the kitchen in search of the cookie tin. When the fan ran out of battery power, they opened all the windows and took a cold shower together, Blythe’s puckered nipples warming to the heat of Max’s chest and his arousal undiminished by the icy spray.

There were forays for water, forays for fortifying fruit juices, but mainly there were forays into each other until, at last, too exhausted and sated to care about the stray bits of tuna fish and chocolate chunks, Blythe fell asleep in midkiss.

When she woke up, Max was propped up on one elbow, gazing down at her in a brightly lit room.

“Electricity?” she murmured sleepily, trying to burrow back into the hollow of his shoulder.

“Sun,” he said, his voice low and warm. “It’s after ten o’clock.” His fingertip trailed lazily over her bare stomach, and Blythe instinctively tried to make her navel touch her tailbone. “How do you feel?”

“Fantastic. How do you feel?”

He hesitated a moment, still tracing her skin. “Fantastic…and surprised.”

Blythe frowned into his shoulder. “What kind of surprise? Good surprise? Bad surprise?” He’d mentioned that in Candy’s phone call, Blythe had sounded like a person with a lot of nerve, and admittedly, she’d put all the nerve she had into last night, but what if he’d expected more assertiveness? More imaginative ideas? More leather? Some, anyway?

There was a raspy chuckle in his voice. “Good surprise. Definitely. I mean, I’d hoped this would happen. You have to admit I came prepared.”

“For an orgy,” she muttered, thinking of the endless supply of condoms he’d reached for during the night, “but of course, a person in your position would have taken extra precautions. Besides, they were probably tax-deductible. Or maybe you get them free from salesmen.”

He gave her an odd look. “Why would I get them free?”

“Because tonight, or last night, was business-related.”

He found a bit of chocolate on her ear and licked it off, making her shiver. “I suppose you could call it business-related.”

She grew very still. “Did it feel like more than business to you?” The words came timidly. “Because it did to me.”

He buried his face in her neck. “It had nothing to do with business. In fact, if we’re going to be working together, we have to keep this totally separate from business or I won’t get any work done.”

For the first time, Blythe felt that something might be a little bit wrong. She came fully awake.

“Yeah.” He was talking to himself now and sounding nostalgic. “When you called—”

But she hadn’t called him. Candy had.

“—and offered to welcome me personally to New York—”

Blythe stiffened. Ooh. A whole lot wrong.

“—I asked Bart about you and he said—”

How did he know Bart?

“‘Candy Jacobsen? It should be quite a welcome.’ So Bart’s already expecting hanky-panky in the office and it would be a shame to disappoint—”

Blythe spun into a sitting position before she interrupted him. She needed to feel more on top of things. “Candy? You came here to do this with Candy?”

He sat up even straighter than she had and stared at her. “No, I came here to take you out on a date. Things happened. Like a blown transformer. And why are you referring to yourself in the third person?” With one foot he began to fish for something on the floor. In a second or two he brought those little black briefs up with his toes and slid them under the covers. The violent thrashing of the sheets and blankets was a dead giveaway that he was putting them on.

Blythe fished with her toes, too, and brought up the peach silk boxers and camisole he’d tossed to the floor the night before, which was beginning to feel like a lifetime ago. She struggled into them, babbling. “Because I’m very much afraid there is a third person! You were coming at seven o’clock. To help me get over Sven.” She leaped out of bed, darted to her closet and pulled out a pair of flowered capris, tugging them clumsily up over the boxers, which felt as if she’d put them on backward.

When she turned back to face him, he was out of bed with one leg in his jeans and his arms folded across his chest. The black briefs had a ripped seam down the left side. She had a feeling they hadn’t been ripped until she had ripped them off him. “Candy,” he said slowly and grimly, “who’s Sven?”

“I’m not Candy,” she said desperately.

“Then who the hell are you?” He almost yelled the words.

“I’m Candy’s roommate. You’re supposed to be Candy’s old friend, the sensitive psychiatrist from Boston who was coming here to shrink my sexual insecurities.”

“I’ve never met Candy, and I am for sure not a psychiatrist.” His eyes widened. “You were planning to do this with some other guy?”

“No, I wasn’t, but then I met you and decided I would, and after last night, the other guy isn’t necessary anymore. After last night—” she lowered her voice to a whisper “—I don’t think I have sexual insecurities.” She cleared her throat. “Ah, what line of work are you in, because I’m sure a psychiatrist couldn’t have dealt with my problem any more sensitively than you did.”

Glaring at her, he stepped out of the pants leg he’d just gotten into instead of putting on the jeans completely. Blythe was sure he had no idea he wasn’t wearing anything but his ripped briefs while he gave her his full credentials, or that while his voice sounded cold, his erection persisted. “I’m Max Laughton, political columnist, formerly with the Chicago Observer, and starting Monday, with the New York Telegraph. And I should have guessed the Telegraph was a congenial place to work when Candy called and invited me out. I just couldn’t believe it would be—” his voice deepened to a growl “—quite this congenial!”

The growl had almost built to a roar when a sound came from the living room, a sound that chilled Blythe to her very bones. The whoosh of the door opening and closing, followed by Candy’s voice, which although it was a little out of breath, somehow projected across miles. “Come on in, Garth. I’ll make the introductions and then I’ll get cleaned up and skedaddle back down the frigging stairs so you two can go for it. Blythe?” It was a shout. “We’re here. You okay?”

No! Not anymore! She’d stolen Candy’s date, and there would be hell to pay.

She swallowed. “I’m fine,” Blythe called. “I’ve been so worried about you!” With Candy safe and sound, she was considerably more worried about herself.

“I spent the night in the frigging office,” Candy yelled. “Garth got caught on the wrong side of the Triborough Bridge and the frigging state patrol put him in a homeless shelter in Queens.” Her voice seemed more distant. “He asked for a hotel and they said, ‘Whadda ya think we are, a frigging travel agency?’” Blythe heard her laugh. “Hey! Good news! We bought coffee from a guy on the street cooking on frigging propane.”

“Candy, really, your language.” That must be whatshisname, Garth, speaking. He had a pleasant-sounding voice, but it didn’t stroke her the way Max’s voice did when he wasn’t yelling at her.

“Is she coming in here?” Max crossed his hands over the crotch of his ripped briefs.

“I’m sure she wouldn’t.” Blythe suddenly snapped out of her stupor. “I’ll be out in a minute,” she shouted, making wild gestures at Max to “keep quiet” and “get dressed” and “keep quiet” again for good measure. “I, ah, overslept,” she improvised. “Just throwing on some clothes.”

While Max scrambled through the small bag he’d gotten the condoms out of—oh, Lord, the condoms they’d used—emerging with a pair of wildly patterned boxer shorts and a different pair of pants, tan slacks this time, she tugged a peach tank top over her head, then snagged her fingers in her tangled hair.

“Don’t dress up for us.” Garth again. “We look like we’ve spent the night in jail.”

“Did you hear anything from my date?” Candy yelled. “I couldn’t reach him. Did he show up here?”

“I’m very much afraid he did,” Blythe said in her normal voice, sending a condemnatory glance in Max’s direction, which was lost on him because he was concentrating on the buttons of a tan-and-blue striped shirt. One flew off. He snarled and reached into his bag, coming out with another shirt, this one navy.

“What did you say?” Candy yelled.

“I said we’ll talk in a minute.”

Blythe took a peek at herself in the mirror and groaned. She looked like, and undoubtedly reeked with, the scent of sex. She should have worn a bra under the tank top. Her nipples were sticking out through the camisole, but there wasn’t time to do anything about her appearance. Directing another set of pushing and lip-slashing “stay back and keep quiet” gestures at Max, who was still ignoring her, she inched open the door and went out to face the music. Or rather, Candy and the psychiatrist, a pair she’d spent the night wronging.

“Hi,” she said, smiling brightly.

“Oh, there you are,” Candy called from the kitchen. “Garth, say hi to Blythe. Then would you light the frigging stove so we can keep the coffee warm? I’m doing something wrong. Blythe, what were you saying about my date?”

Blythe felt the blood draining from her face and realized Garth was staring at her, so she darted a glance at him. He was attractive, just as Candy had said, but his face didn’t have the character, the punch Max’s did. She scanned the rest of him while she tried to think of an answer to give Candy. His blondness was accentuated by a pale beige summer suit, badly creased, a light blue-striped shirt and a blue tie patterned in yellow—she squinted at it—ducks.

He didn’t seem to notice how distracted she was. A sensitive man would have taken one look at her and called 9-1-1. Instead, he said over his shoulder as he went to save Candy from blowing up the building, “Wow. Candy told me you were a great-looking girl, but that was an understatement.”

“Did he?” Candy said, stepping out of the kitchen as soon as Garth stepped in. “My date, Blythe. Did he show up?” She sounded impatient.

Candy also looked the worse for wear. The toes of her pointed shoes curled up and wrinkles made her linen skirt even shorter. There were deep circles under her eyes. She must have had a hard time getting back to the office and an uncomfortable night sleeping there, just to assure Blythe’s privacy with Garth. Blythe’s guilt grew and compounded.

Feeling the blood rush back to her face, Blythe said, “I…well, he…”

“All lit up,” Garth said, returning to the living room.

“It just wasn’t fair for that transformer to blow up yesterday,” Candy said, pouting. “I had a date with Max Laughton, a dreamboat who’s coming to the Telegraph from the Chicago Observer. Soon as I found out he’d been hired, I decided to get dibbies on him, because if he’s half as hunky as his picture—”

A loud crash from Blythe’s room caused both Candy and Garth to swivel their heads toward the closed door. “Who’s in there?” Candy asked in a hushed tone.

“Well,” Blythe said, “I think it might be somebody trying to fix the bed. See, the strangest thing happened…”

“You broke your bed?”

“My, oh my, oh my,” Garth murmured, gazing ceilingward.

“While I was trying to get Garth here to mend your psyche, you found somebody to break your frigging bed?” Candy’s expression wavered between shock and admiration.

“Not exactly,” Blythe mumbled.

“Then who—” Candy’s eyes widened. “Oh, no. It couldn’t be.”

She whizzed past Blythe toward the closed bedroom door. Just as she reached it, it opened and Max strode out, wearing a navy blazer over his shirt and slacks. The crisp-cut outfit was a little incongruous with his unshaved face. Through the doorway, Blythe could see that he’d made up the bed and somehow put the footboard back on—upside down.

“Good morning,” he said in a jarringly hearty tone. “Wow.” He looked at Blythe, who stood quivering beside the sofa. “Either you slept on the sofa in your clothes or you sure were quiet when you came in to get them. I didn’t wake up until I heard all the yelling.”