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Johnny immediately thought of Professor Rachel Smith. She was the only one he was worried about. He didn’t like pretending with her. He felt a connection with her, an inner link he’d never felt with any woman before. That’s why he was so frustrated that he’d missed Mr. Farrell’s phone call. He had to talk to him about that sex test.
Rachel quickened her towel strokes as she dried the dinner dishes in Kim’s kitchen. “Kim, I’m taking Zane Farrell’s name off the sex-study list.”
“You can’t do that, Rachel,” Kim said, rushing from the sink to clean up her two-year-old daughter, Stacy’s, spilled milk on the floor.
A waterfall of tears started streaming down Stacy’s chubby cheeks at her mistake. Rachel ran over and lifted the little girl out of the high chair into her arms to soothe her.
“Hey, little one, sometimes I’m a gooky mess, too.” Rachel wiggled her finger into Stacy’s tummy to make her giggle. “I don’t know what I’d do without you, little one.” A warm feeling of family enveloped her.
“Stacy would be lost without her second mommy,” Kim said with a wink.
Rachel set a now-contented Stacy back in her high chair. She gently kissed Stacy’s cheek, but inside, she felt in turmoil. All because of Zane Farrell.
Warmth enveloped her just thinking about his twinkling sea-blue eyes. How he’d sensed the pain inside her when he’d asked her whether sex with a man made her forget who she was. How he’d quickly changed the subject to protect her feelings, even though he didn’t understand what they were.
She remembered how her breasts ached to be caressed by him when he’d lifted her in his strong arms in his gym to stop her from falling. And how she’d never wanted him to let go. No, she couldn’t go back there, not ever.
“What do you mean, I can’t eliminate Farrell from the study?” Rachel prompted. “He’s not right for the research. We’ll find another entrepreneur for the upper-crust category.”
“No, we won’t,” her friend said firmly. “Unless you want to buck heads with Chancellor Zilford.”
“The chancellor?” A ripple of nervousness flitted through her. More than anything, she wanted to impress the head of the university with her first research assignment.
“When Chancellor Zilford heard that Zane Farrell had volunteered for the study, he gave his hundred-percent approval to the project.”
“Why?” She suddenly felt Kim’s delicious chicken-cutlet dinner nauseatingly rise in her throat.
“Before you came to the university, Zane Farrell donated three million for a new building on campus. The chancellor plans to name the structure Farrell Hall. I don’t think he would appreciate learning you scratched Mr. Farrell’s name from the research list.”
“But I can’t work with him,” she protested, feeling helpless. “He’s a thick-headed, overgrown—”
“Are you talking about me?” asked Kim’s husband, Charlie, as he sauntered into the kitchen munching on a fireengine-red apple.
“Maybe we are, handsome,” Kim teased as she lifted Stacy out of her high chair, patted the little girl’s cute behind and sent her off to the living room to play.
Charlie slipped his arms around his wife’s waist and planted a deep kiss on her mouth.
“Am I impossible now?” he murmured against Kim’s ear.
Rachel felt an ache in her heart and turned back to drying the dishes. She both admired and envied Kim’s marriage of six years. She knew a forever-love like theirs could never happen to her. Not after the catastrophe that had occurred between her and Kent two years ago.
Her eyes blurred as the nightmare evening flashed into her mind. Three days before their wedding, she and Kent were kissing on his apartment sofa. She’d known him since junior high and had never gone out with any other man.
But on that fateful night as Rachel pressed her eager body to his and parted her lips against his mouth, Kent abruptly pulled away. He got off the sofa and paced the floor, avoiding her confused eyes.
“Kent, what’s wrong?” she asked. “What did I do?”
Then Kent let loose in a way that would mar her life from that moment on.
“Do you know why we’ve never had intercourse together?” he blasted.
“Because we want to wait for our wedding night,” she replied, feeling a chill as an ice wall grew between them.
“No!” he blurted out. “It’s because I don’t want to make love to you, Rachel.” His face twisted in agony, looking shocked by his own admission.
“Wh-what do you mean?” she stammered, clutching the neckline of her blouse together, as if to shield her exposed heart from him.
“You’re always thinking about sex,” he said tightly. “You’re always touching me. Always so easily aroused. With your heavy breathing and excessive bodily reactions, you’re downright intimidating.”
“Kent, don’t say that,” she cried out. He was tearing apart her soul.
“You make me feel sexually inadequate,” he railed. “No man will ever be able to satisfy you, Rachel. No man.” In Kim’s kitchen, Rachel flopped down on a chair at the table. She was still reeling from Kent’s accusations. Two whole years wasn’t enough time for her to recover from his verbal attack on her sexuality. From that moment on, she’d closed herself off from all sexual feeling, all sexual fantasies and any deep emotional affinity she could ever share with a man. Until Zane Farrell.
That’s why she couldn’t see Zane again. He’d unlocked her Pandora’s box. He’d touched the most bruised and vulnerable spot of her entire being. He’d connected with her heart.
Kim gave Charlie another peck on the lips. “Now get out of here, Charlie Woods.” She playfully pushed him into the living room to his daughter and then turned to Rachel.
“Take my advice,” Kim urged. “If you want to stay in good with the chancellor, you better give Zane Farrell one more chance.”
“Kim, I can’t,” she said in a desperate tone. “Will you take over his interviews for me?”
“I wish I could,” Kim replied. “But my schedule’s horribly tight right now. Rachel, I don’t understand. Why are you so anxious to get rid of Farrell?”
“The man’s totally impossible,” she said, avoiding Kim’s eyes.
She could feel Kim studying her in that close-girlfriend way of hers. “Rachel, are you attracted’to him?”
“Definitely not!” she denied. Her friend’s knowing hazel eyes were still on her. “Okay, okay, the man is sort of sexy.”
“Sort of?”
“He’s a major turn-on.”
“And you want to give him up?”
“I don’t need a member of the male population in my life right now, Kim.”
“What are you afraid of, Rachel?” Kim asked with concern. “It’s still Kent, isn’t it?”
“No!” she insisted, unable to summon the courage to tell her friend the horror of shame she felt about her sexual self.
“Please, Kim, will you take the Zane Farrell case study from me?” she begged. “I still have the accountant and orthopedic surgeon to interview. No one will even notice.”
Kim was silent as she poured them both a cup of herbal tea. “As soon as my schedule frees up, I’ll take Farrell from you. Can you hold out until then?”
“You promise?” Rachel asked, praying she really would.
“Promise.”
Rachel hugged her. “I owe you, buddy.”
All day at his car-repair shop, that university sex study Mr. Farrell had volunteered for was busting Johnny’s brains. He dreaded telling Mr. Farrell that he’d totally messed up the interview. But he was going to admit it, nonetheless.
“Tito, did Mr. Farrell say when he’d call me back?” Johnny asked as he handed a customer her car key after completing her repairs.
“Mr. Farrell said he was going to Taiwan,” Tito responded.
“Did he leave a phone number where I can reach him?”
“No number, Johnny,” Tito replied. “He told me he is sure you are handling everything A-OK for him. He is not worried. He knows you will make all the correct decisions in his place.”
“Riiigght,” Johnny slurred under his breath. “Thanks, Tito.”
“One more thing, Johnny,” Tito added, rubbing his nose with an oily hand and smudging more lubricant on his face. “My lady asked if you will come over and eat with us. She will make your favorite chalupa.”
“Name the date and time and I’ll be there,” Johnny replied, a smile coming to his face at just the thought.
Tito’s wife and four kids had taken him in like one of their own. Johnny’s mother and father were killed in an auto accident when he was twelve years old. Their car brakes had faltered. He ran away from the abusive Michigan foster home he was put in, and hitchhiked to Los Angeles where Mr. Farrell found him and guided him back to constructive living. Maybe Johnny’s parents’ car tragedy was the reason that keeping automobiles in perfect order was so important to him.
It was closing time, but three cars in need of repair pulled into Johnny’s shop, anyway. He could never refuse a customer who needed service. His shop was suddenly spinning with malfunctioning Volvos and M.G.’s. He barely had time to think about Rachel Smith and her sex interview.
That is, until later that evening. Johnny spent one night a week in his own apartment while house-sitting for Mr. Farrell. As Johnny watered the miniature vegetable garden he’d planted on the small plot beside his rent-controlled Santa Monica apartment, his mind wandered to Professor Rachel Smith.
Maybe it was the silver moon in the black velvet sky. Maybe he was tired and his body was beginning to relax. But as he sprayed his tomato plants, Johnny fantasized that Rachel was standing in front of him right that moment. He wanted to bask in the warmth of her feminine presence and delight in her defiant, stubborn and exciting nature.
He pictured Rachel’s swelling ivory breasts spilling over her spaghetti-strapped rose-colored dress as he’d gripped her waist in Mr. Farrell’s gym.
When her taut nipples strained against the cotton fabric, he’d realized her ample breasts were bra-free. How close his hungry mouth had been to suckling one pert nipple.
The sprinkling garden hose suddenly veered off course into his landlord’s cactus plant. He quickly turned off the water faucet. In a few minutes, he hit the bed, still smelling the sweet gardenia scent of her skin.
He fisted his pillow several times to get comfortable, but he was plagued with Rachel Smith thoughts. He kept picturing her soft body cuddled up to his in a tender embrace.
Restless, he got up and peered out the window at the shining star-glazed night. A half smile formed on his lips. Rachel had practically stripped her car gears to get away from him.
Yes, he’d definitely ticked her off. He’d gotten to her academic insides and stirred her up a bit. She was highly emotional, he could tell. Women who got that stormy, that quickly, usually had a healthy passionate nature and a tender sensitivity. He couldn’t deny it. He was irresistibly drawn to Rachel, more than to any woman he’d ever known.
A cloud suddenly hid the moon, and a dark shadow brushed over Johnny’s heart. Forget your emotional pull to Rachel, he silently told himself. You’re invisible to her. She sees Zane Farrell, not you.
He’d permitted his own powerful attraction to her to seep through and go beyond the boundary he had to have with Professor Smith. He wouldn’t let that happen again. No sir. He wasn’t going to disappoint Mr. Farrell.
He had to make Mr. Farrell’s volunteer study a successful one. Not that Johnny could figure out why a man like Mr. Farrell would ever participate in a sex research project.
Johnny hopped back into bed and punched his pillow into a snug position. Professor Rachel Smith, get ready. Mr. Farrell’s sex study was definitely not over yet. Johnny would play his role with more of a Zane Farrell cultured flare and not allow the uncouth, uneducated Johnny Wells to interfere again.
The next morning, Rachel pressed the fifteenth-floor elevator button in the steel-and-glass building in downtown Los Angeles for her second case-study interview, Harvey Glitt, a certified public accountant to the wealthiest business people in Los Angeles.
In the accounting office, Rachel tried to concentrate on quiet, shy Harvey Glitt with his bow tie, tall bony frame and pale complexion. Harvey yearned for a relationship with a woman, almost begged for one. The poor man had negative sex appeal. Maybe he was the type of male she needed. No arousal threat. Only platonic friends.
Rachel knew if she ever let loose her sexuality again with Zane Farrell, she’d lose her sensibilities, her logic, and would end up in a disastrous situation like the one she’d been in with Kent. And she never wanted to hurt Zane that way.
She made an unending vow to herself. The next time she was with Zane, she would demolish every emotionally close and sensually tempting thought that rose to her consciousness. Zane would remain a purely academic study to her. That was all.
The moment she returned to her office at the university, she quickly recovered Zane Farrell’s home phone number from the trash can where she’d angrily hurled it after their last encounter.
She nervously fingered the wrinkled sheet of paper. Excuses for never seeing him again lightning-flashed through her mind. But she refused to retreat. She’d keep it friendly but emotionally distant.
Just as she picked up the phone, there was a knock at her closed office door. She barely uttered a “come in” when the door powerfully swung open Zane Farrell-style. A bouquet of gleaming white gardenias were in Zane’s hands.
“Rachel, before you throw a lamp at me,” he began in his deeply resonating voice, “can we make a truce?” He handed her the sweetly scented flowers and added, “The aroma is definitely you.”
Rachel was so surprised, she couldn’t utter a word. She hugged the precious gardenias to her and inhaled a long, deep intake of flower-scented air with her eyes never leaving his.
Zane leaned against the wall of her office watching her, as if he belonged, like he was part of her life. And for that second, she wished that he really was.
Stop it, Rachel Smith. Control yourself. You promised.
She set the flowers down on her desk. “I assume this is a confirmation that you’re still a candidate for the university study?” she managed to say in her best businesslike voice.
“Only if you’ll have dinner with me tonight at The Wave Restaurant.”
His enticing eyes twinkled at her, and she suspected that his invitation was filled with much more than thoughts of the case study.
Thump, thump, thump, went her heart. A romantic dinner. Tenderly holding hands at the table. Eyes entwined. An invitation back to his mansion. Then a peak at his bedroom. Then his bed.
Be the professor, not the woman, she cautioned herself.
“Will the restaurant be conducive for our interview?” she asked carefully.
“Absolutely. One hundred percent,” he said confidently. “Eight o’clock?”
“Seven,” she firmly countered.
He chuckled as though pleased she was still wearing her battle gear. “Seven it is, Professor Smith. Shall I pick you up here or at your apartment?”
“I’ll meet you at the restaurant.” Keep it impersonal. Distant. All business.
“I look forward to it.” Then he was gone.
She plopped down on her desk chair. Why did he have to touch her heart by bringing those beautiful flowers? And why did he have to be so sexy? Could he see her trembling in his presence?
She quickly phoned Kim for support. “Kim, I can’t go to dinner with him,” she said, nervously stretching the phone cord.
“Just concentrate on the study,” Kim advised.
“How soon will you be freed up to take over his interviews?”
“Maybe in a week or so.” Her friend hesitated. “Will you be okay?”
