Who's on Top?

by Karen Kendall

  If only her ma knew how much debt her perfect angel had taken on to start Finesse! Jane pulled up the Quicken software, her smile fading fast. The offices, their salaries, their health insurance, the cost of marketing. If Finesse didn’t get some major business on the books soon, the bank was going to start heavy breathing down her collar.

  Lilia had a group seminar on business etiquette coming up, as well as a gig to teach some eighth-graders in a private school. And she was advertising in the upper-end neighborhoods for cotillion classes.

  Shannon was speaking to a women’s club in Farmington and to one in Stamford. Then she had seminars lined up on several college campuses, one in a large sorority. Jane prayed she wouldn’t forget to get rid of the weird nail polish colors, not to mention removing the pink streak from her blond hair. Shan was going to have to remember that this was not Los Angeles!

  Jane could barely remember the three of them at age fourteen, dressed in their matching school uniforms. Surely Shannon had never worn drab olive cardigans, white button-down blouses and navy plaid skirts? Oh, and knee socks with loafers! But the past didn’t lie.

  Jane, today, came the closest of all of them to wearing that old girls’ school uniform. She’d traded the knee socks for knee-highs and the loafers for pumps, but she still wore a uniform: the pantsuit. Okay, so she didn’t own anything in plaid, but there were an embarrassing number of plain white shirts in her closet. Ditto white bras and panties.

  Which was why she’d rebelled one day and sent off for the ruby-red lace. See where impulse had gotten her?

  She needed a pair of pink stilettos like she needed a hole in her head.

  Jane again avoided Mr. Rats-for-Breakfast’s intense stare and began to work, fingers clicking busily over the keyboard.

  Two plastic chairs down from her, a couple of older women gossiped about their neighbors, relatives and congregation members.

  Across from them sat a wizened old man who was picking his teeth and, to Jane’s disgust, sucking on the, uh, treasure trapped between them.

  She prayed for her twin washing machines to do their job speedily and resolved to drag home wet clothes. Her dryer worked perfectly well, and she really wanted to get out of the Cash-Wash. Where were the hunky young guys featured on the C-W TV ads? The ones who were clad only in their last pair of clean underwear and had to ask women for advice on water temperature and detergent? Talk about false advertising!

  When the lurching and spinning of the machines came to a stop, Jane piled all of her soggy clothes into her white plastic laundry basket and tossed her briefcase on top. She lugged the heavy load past the gossips, the tooth-picker and finally Mr. Rats-for-Breakfast, avoiding his gaze for the last time. Keeping her eyes fixed upon a red sock in the basket, she bumped out the door with her behind. She was glad neither Dominic nor Arianna could see her right now, since she looked a lot more like a chambermaid than the CEO of her own company.

  As Jane drove home, past the mini-mart and the dry cleaner and the gas station, thoughts of Dominic intruded into her mind. For the first time she considered whether or not she owed him an apology. She’d behaved somewhat like a terrier in the restaurant, cornering him about his past. And she didn’t want to think about the fact that her behavior had been fueled by her own defensiveness. She couldn’t just relax and let down her guard around Dominic Sayers. He threatened her—not physically—on some deeper, primal level.

  She stopped for a traffic light and it hit her: she knew she couldn’t manage him. He was beyond her control. She struggled with the revelation. I am the ultimate control freak. She didn’t necessarily like it, but there it was.

  Jane managed and controlled everyone in her life, especially the men in her family. She’d had to hold them together emotionally when her mother died.

  I can’t control him, and that scares me. Unnerves me. Worse, it drove her wild. She was always struggling for the power seat with him in the room. And he saw through it.

  Dominic saw through her surface competence to the vulnerable woman underneath.

  It was just hell on a woman when she couldn’t keep her sphinx face.

  The car behind her honked, and Jane realized she’d been staring into space, driving on Mars instead of Route 4 in Farmington. Dominic had her all tangled up.

  She saw him as a boy in her mind’s eye—a dark, skinny tangle of elbows and knees, at the tip of a twenty-foot mast in a thunderstorm, trying to untangle a spinnaker line.

  She tried to imagine the kind of mother who would send her child up a lightning rod on a turbulent, thunderous afternoon.

  She tried to imagine the kind of woman who would burn down her own house just to get her son’s attention. Just to keep her gravy train en route.

  Jane turned into her driveway without being conscious of how she’d gotten there. Her eyes were wet with tears. Oh, yes. She had an apology to make.

  11

  JANE HATED APOLOGIES. SHE went out of her way to avoid making mistakes so that she’d never have to offer them. Apologies admitted weakness. They revealed that you hadn’t thought out what you were doing before you did it. Apologies really sucked.

  She stared at her phone for a long time before picking it up, noting the fact that its white plastic surface needed to be cleaned. She found a bottle of orange-scented antibacterial spray and a rag and scrubbed every inch of the device. The automatic operator squawked as she attacked each push button, every little pore in the ear-and mouthpieces of the receiver.“Please hang up and try your call again. Please hang up and try your call again. Please…” Then the inevitable annoying bleep, bleep, bleep until she had completed her task.

  She put the bottle of spray away and tossed the rag into her laundry hamper. Then she stared at the phone again. No avoiding it or her conscience. She had to call him.

  He answered after three rings, his voice deep and abrupt. God, that voice! Just the sexy gravel in it shot a tremor up her thighs.

  “Dominic, it’s Jane.”

  Silence. Then he said, “Yes?”

  Not “Oh, hello, Jane.” Not “How are you?” Just “Yes?” in the chilliest tone of voice she’d ever heard.

  She swallowed and tried to unstick her tongue from the roof of her mouth. “I called because…”

  More daunting silence. None of the flippant entendre that she’d come to expect from him.

  “I called because I think I owe you…” God, why was it so hard to say? “…an apology.”

  He laughed softly, which set her whole body to “vibrate.” “I’m stunned. Why?”

  “I put you on the spot, forced you to talk. Backed you into a corner.”

  “Jane, darlin’, you have way too exalted a notion of your own power.”

  She drew in her breath with a hiss.

  “But thank you. It’s very magnanimous of you.”

  “Look, if you’re going to be a jerk about it, then I’m sorry I called.”

  “Jane.” He’d dropped the sarcasm now. “I didn’t say anything that I didn’t want to say. What bothers me is why I wanted to tell you those things. Hmm? I’ve never told anyone those particular details of my childhood. But for some reason I told you. You, of all people.” He laughed again but without humor. “I’ve played right into your hands, haven’t I, sweet Jane? Tell you what. You do exactly what you think you should with that information. But I’m not giving you any more. That was our last meeting. Have a nice life, Jane.”

  She stared at her squeaky-clean receiver once the dial tone hit her ear.

  I am so confused. I have him by the balls, so to speak. Yet I just apologized to him. And somehow he’s taken the power back before hanging up on me! What is wrong with this picture? He is so alpha male. He is so frustrating. And damn it—damn it!—he turns me on….

  DOMINIC PUT DOWN THE PHONE and expected to feel relief. Jane O’Toole was now officially out of his life. He didn’t care what the hell she wrote in her idiotic report. She could say he’d been raised by she-wolves, for all he cared. A
rianna would be delighted.

  But the relief he sought by banishing Jane didn’t come. Dom made an omelet, cracking eggs into a bowl with ferocity. Of all the women on the planet, why had he opened up to her?Why talk to a nosy, bossy woman who annoyed him and carried around a clipboard to record his every move? Why talk to Jane O’Toole, who had the dogged instincts of an Irish wolfhound and kissed like Botticelli’s Venus?

  Oh, hey—where had that come from? Dom wondered briefly what Jane would look like naked on a half shell and noticed that he was burning his omelet.

  Smug little psych major. Attempted bet welsher. Sore loser. Uppity female, trying to pay for his meals when all he’d wanted to do was wine, dine and, er…supine her. Ahem. Whether it was in the coat-check closet, under the table or in the bushes outside. His intentions had been pure! Purely wicked.

  Dom burned the other side of his omelet and tried to put himself in Jane’s shoes. How had she felt? She wasn’t stupid. She’d known what his intentions were. So what would he have done in her place?

  “Okay, I’m a woman,” he proclaimed in falsetto tones to his orange cat, Rusty.

  Rusty appeared to wonder where his nuts had gone hiding.

  Dom cleared his throat. “I’m Jane. And this brute has just kissed me, wants to take me to bed. It’s a business relationship, Rusty. I shouldn’t mix it with pleasure.”

  Rusty meowed in anticipation of some omelet, and Dom, who had slid the brown, crunchy mass onto a plate, threw him a piece.

  “Do I give in to my womanly urges, Rusty?”

  The cat sniffed disdainfully at the gruesome nugget in front of him and walked away.

  “I guess that means that I do not.” Dom cast a disgusted look after him. “Thanks, pal.” He took a bite of the so-called food and wrinkled his nose. “Just like Mom used to make.”

  He made a practiced, Frisbee-like maneuver with his plate, and the disc of burned egg went flying into the sink. “No, if I’m Jane, I…put the brute in his place, refuse to let him buy me dinner and pump him for the personal information I need to do my job.” He snorted in disgust. “I do not go to bed with him. I piss him off so that he…backs off. Aha!”

  Rusty wasn’t in the room to listen to his ravings anymore, so he spoke them aloud to himself. “Shrewd little psych major. She pissed me off on purpose.”

  Dom got up and rooted around in his kitchen cabinets for anything edible. He came up with Top Ramen noodles and half of a protein bar. Tragically, after all of this insight, he had to go grocery shopping.

  He made a list, shrugged into a jacket and wondered whether he should have accepted Jane’s apology.

  JANE’S KNEES HURT, AND SHE HAD a blister on her index finger, courtesy of the toothbrush she was using to scrub the tops of her baseboards. This was what came of cursed apologies! She’d gone from being figuratively on her knees to being physically on her knees.

  To be fair, she probably wouldn’t have the blister if she hadn’t been clenching the toothbrush harder than her teeth. Great. Shannon already called her anal-retentive. It now looked as if she’d gone and gotten manually and orally retentive. What would the good Dr. Freud say about that?On second thought, she really didn’t want to know. She already recognized that she was indulging in obsessive-compulsive behavior.

  “Have a nice life, Jane,” she fumed. “Oh, that’s just perfect.” Evil impulses urged her to run, not walk, to her computer and write up Dominic’s evaluation this minute. Rude, she’d type first. Stubborn. Pigheaded and pig-minded.

  Protective of his date even when he’s furious. An unbelievable kisser with a mouth that could melt a glacier…

  Yeah, wouldn’t Arianna be fascinated to read that one. Jane sat back on her haunches and swished the abused toothbrush around in a bowl of sudsy water. Her lower back, neck and shoulders were screaming in protest, but she once again attacked the baseboard. Once Finesse was turning a profit and she could increase their meager salaries, she’d hire a personal maid as well as a cleaning service for the office.

  Huh. Then how would she burn off energy when she was mad?

  Sex. She’d find a boy toy obsessed with his pecs and take the edge off her frustrations that way. That was the perfect solution for a young, single, female executive. She certainly didn’t need to obsess about annoying men like Dominic.

  Boy, it still irked her that he’d beaten her at pool the other night. She couldn’t even remember the last time somebody had beaten her! The loss stuck in her craw more painfully than the apology.

  The more Jane scrubbed and fumed and thought about it, the more it bothered her. He owed her a rematch, whether he liked it or not.

  Jane got to the end of the baseboard, stood up, dropped the toothbrush in the sudsy water and crab-walked to the phone. Her knees! God, her knees…the dirtbag would pay for this. She’d crippled herself for life, and it was all his fault.

  She launched herself at the phone, and because it was already clean, she surged on to the refrigerator.

  “Dominic!” she snapped when he answered, throwing a brownish bunch of celery over her shoulder and into the trash.

  “Jane?”

  “You cannot toss me out of your life before giving me a rematch at the Three-Legged Dog. I won’t have it.” She snatched an apple that was fermenting in the bottom of the fruit drawer and chucked it into the trash can, too.

  “You won’t have it,” he repeated. Was that amusement in his voice? “Well, I beg your pardon. I should have checked to see if you were having it before I cut you out of my life. How rude of me.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “Very inconsiderate.” Cocktail sauce should not be green. Slam dunk. And what on earth used to be in that Ziploc bag? How could she have let her refrigerator get this bad?

  “Tell me,” said Dominic, “why I owe you a rematch.”

  “Because I lost.”

  “So?”

  “I never lose.”

  “Neither do I.”

  Silence.

  Finally Dominic asked, “What if I tell you no?”

  “You won’t do that,” Jane said with false bravado.

  “I won’t?”

  “Nope. Because you’ll wonder whether or not I’d have beaten you.”

  “Yeah. And that might keep me up at night.”

  “You’re laughing at me.”

  “No, no—I’m considering this challenge very seriously. And I think I’ll meet you, under one condition.”

  “What condition?” Jane asked suspiciously.

  “If you lose this time, you spend the night with me.”

  Words failed her.

  “And then,” he purred, “we’ll both be certain of what you’re having.”

  She hated the sudden hot flash this caused her. Arrogant SOB! “You—you—”

  “Shall we say seven? At the Dog. Tomorrow night. ’Bye, Jane.”

  She was left clutching a sparkling-clean phone, a slimy, blackened bouquet of parsley and a truly hideous possibility.

  She’d never had an orgasm during actual intercourse. Her goal was to have at least one that way before she died. That wasn’t overly ambitious, was it? And judging by her body’s uncharted response to him, Dominic Sayers was her only hope.

  AND THEN WE’LL BOTH BE CERTAIN of what you’re having.

  Dominic’s voice echoed in her mind until Jane wanted to explode, and cleaning the fridge did nothing to cool her off. She relived the scene in the Dog’s parking lot over and over, try as she might to banish it from her mind. She felt Dominic’s mouth, set off by sexy stubble, on every part of her body. Finally, in desperation, she headed for a cold shower to snap her out of it.She turned on the shower spray, threw off all her clothes and left them in a very un-Jane-like mess on the bathroom floor. But she couldn’t quite force herself to get into the icy water and waited for it to heat up.

  Once inside, she slid the glass door closed and reached for her sea sponge and foaming gel, soaping her neck and shoulders. Dominic’s face appeared in her mind
and he grinned a purely wicked grin.

  The sea sponge slipped off her shoulder and between her wet breasts, scraping along one areola and causing the pink tip to tighten, harden and bud. Jane closed her eyes and blocked out everything but the sound of the water sluicing down.

  She stroked the sea sponge under one breast, around it and then back under the other one. They felt inordinately heavy and they ached.

  Gently she touched her fingers to her left nipple, vaguely embarrassed at her actions even though she was in the privacy of her own shower. It had been so long…too long…and the episode in the parking lot of the bar had reminded her. It still tormented her. What if the men hadn’t come out the door just then? Would she have been crazy enough to let Dominic take her against the side of his car? Lay her on the hood? Bend her over it?

  The images left her breathless and excruciatingly sensitive to each droplet of water rolling down her body. She pressed her thighs together, but that only made things worse. She spread them and moved under the shower spray, sucking in her lower lip. She raised her knee and propped her foot on the built-in corner seat. But water was no substitute for what she craved.

  Jane squeezed the sea sponge and almost unconsciously brought it down to her nipple again, circling it with featherlight touches. She turned to face the shower spray again and let her fantasies take over.

  She felt Dom’s mouth close around her breast…suck, lick, fondle. He was naked in the shower with her, pushing her down onto the built-in corner seat, kneeling between her thighs as he masterfully tortured her nipples.