“Right,” he said with reluctance.
“And you were going to take me to your place, right?”
“Well, temporarily. I thought we’d send out for Chinese food or something, and—”
“And I would live there with you, right?”
“Wrong,” he said emphatically. “That wasn’t the plan.”
“It better not have been, since I turned it down when you proposed it. Of all the dirty, low-down, rotten, manipulative schemes—”
“Hold on to your horses, darlin’. It’s not what you think it is.”
“What I think it is I wouldn’t even say out loud. I am coming over to your place, Deke Washburn, and I am going to pack as much of my stuff into my car as I possibly can, and then I am going to make tracks to the most elegant hotel in Atlanta and have them send you the bill, because I am going to live there until I find my own apartment.” She slammed the phone down before he could reply and marched into the living room.
“Dorian, please stay here,” Sandra said hesitantly. “Believe me, I never would have moved in if Jill hadn’t said it was okay.”
“It’s not your fault. Or yours, Jill,” Dorian said. She slid her arms into her jacket and picked up her suitcase. “I’ll call you later and let you know how it all turns out. And you’d better believe I’ll be phoning from the Ritz, at the very least.”
Before Jill and Sandra could stop her, she was out the door, down the steps and across the bridge to the parking lot. She got in her car—Deke’s car, she reminded herself—and headed for Deke’s neighborhood. Of all the high-handed, scheming things to do, she fumed as she moved at a snail’s pace through the snarl of traffic on the way to the Europa. She’d give Deke Washburn a piece of her mind. She’d—
Oh, she would. But inside she was dismayed. She was crushed. She was devastated that her homecoming to Atlanta was not all that she had anticipated.
She was furious with him. Absolutely furious. But even her rage couldn’t suppress the surge of excitement she felt when she thought about making love with Deke again, even in anger.
* * *
“I WAS ONLY TRYING to surprise you,” Deke said as Dorian stormed into his apartment.
She whirled around to face him. “Oh, you surprised me, all right.”
To his credit, Deke looked properly chagrined. “Listen, Dorian, to the way it was supposed to happen. I was supposed to pick you up at the airport and greet you with a big hug and a kiss. My plan was to bring you here and we’d order dinner, after which I’d spring a nice surprise,” he said, pacing the length of the living room.
“And then what? You expected me to greet this—this invasion of my privacy with great joy and happiness?” she asked incredulously.
He lifted his shoulders and let them fall. “Well, yes. I thought you’d be happy. You were looking for another apartment, weren’t you?”
“I hadn’t intended to leave the one I shared with Jill so soon! Deke, put yourself in my place. Can you imagine how I felt when I walked into La Roacherie and saw Jill’s new roommate lying on the couch, reading one of my old magazines? When I walked into what used to be my bedroom and saw Sandra’s quilt on my bed?” By this time, her voice had risen an octave or two in indignation.
“Well,” Deke allowed, scratching his ear thoughtfully, “I guess you must have been a tad upset.”
Dorian closed her eyes and counted to ten. “Upset isn’t the word for it,” she said in a dangerously low tone. “Livid is more like it. I felt—invaded. Uprooted. Hurt. How could you, Deke?”
“I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known how you’d take it,” he said with a weary sigh. “Honestly, Dorian, I wouldn’t have.”
He moved toward her but she turned around so she wouldn’t have to look at him. That didn’t stop him from talking.
“I had it in my power to do something for you that you couldn’t do for yourself. You’re so all-fired independent, Dorian. I like to do things for you—it makes me happy to make you happy. I wish you’d let me do more. Why can’t you accept that?”
She could hear him approaching, feel his gaze on the back of her neck. She tipped her head back and blinked away tears, wishing that there was an easy answer to his question written on the ceiling.
There wasn’t, and she knew what she should do. She should walk out and go directly to the Ritz, book a room, and not tell him where she had gone. She should never speak to him again as long as she lived.
But he was so contrite. He was being so nice, so decent. She inhaled a deep breath and turned around. He was within arm’s length of her now; she could have reached out and touched him.
“The apartment is a lovely one-bedroom on the sixth floor, Dorian. The woman who lived there decided to go to Hawaii for six months and wanted someone to live in it. It’s completely furnished, right down to the last teaspoon, and the colors are soft corals and pinks and grays.
“When I met this lady in the elevator and she said she was at her wit’s end to find someone who would rent the place and water her plants, I immediately thought of you. And I knew you’d love it as soon as I saw it. I was positive that if you were here you would give her a deposit on the spot, but she was leaving in a day or two and I didn’t want her to rent it to someone else. Listen to me, Dorian—it’s a charming little apartment. It’s—”
“You mean you didn’t move my things into this apartment?” Dorian asked, scarcely able to comprehend what Deke was saying.
“No, of course not. After we talked about it, I realized you wouldn’t feel comfortable sharing space with me, and I respect that. I had the movers stack your boxes right inside the door of your new place so you can unpack and put everything where you want it. I’ll help if you like. Won’t you give the place a chance? Don’t you want to go downstairs and look at it?” He was so eager and so crestfallen, all at the same time. He looked so handsome and so unsure of himself. The combination was endearing in this tycoon of the tea business, this self-admitted STUD.
She swallowed the lump in her throat. “I thought—I thought you had moved my things in here, Deke. Jill didn’t say anything about another apartment.”
“I didn’t tell Jill. I was afraid you’d call her up on the phone to chat and she’d let the cat out of the bag. It was supposed to be a surprise, and I handled it all wrong.”
Suddenly Dorian couldn’t think. She couldn’t move. She was exhausted from traveling and from the stress of finding out that Jill had replaced her with a new roommate, not to mention from confronting Deke.
Deke’s dark eyes pleaded with her. “Please don’t see this as just another screwup by Deke Washburn.”
Dorian closed her eyes. She had a terrible, pounding headache.
He touched her shoulders, slid his hands to her elbows, then to her wrists. She felt captured by him, unable to do anything to save herself. He twined his fingers through hers.
“Dorrie?” he said quietly, using her nickname for the first time. “Dorian?”
When she opened her eyes, all she could see was Deke’s face, so kind, so gentle, so sweet. She floated into his arms, effortlessly and without thinking about it. He folded her in his embrace as if his body were a shield to protect her from the world.
She drew his familiar masculine scent deep into her lungs and pressed her cheek against the rough texture of his shirt. He held her tightly as she nestled into the familiar comfortable shape of him, the curves of her body filling the angles of his. He caressed her back in long, soothing strokes, and she let herself sink into the comfort of it so that she wouldn’t have to think about anything else.
She had missed Deke so much. All the time she had been in L.A., she’d wanted him with her, adding his thoughts to hers. At night, she had slept alone, but she had wanted his body close beside her, warm and comforting. In the morning, she’d wanted to wake up to him nearby, to turn in his arms and be filled by him once again before she went out into a world that seemed to deplete her day by day.
“I missed you, dar
lin’,” he said. “It was all I could do not to call you on the phone every waking minute just to hear your voice. I wanted to hop a flight, charter a jet, do whatever I had to do to be with you. I managed to stay away, but it was hard. Oh, Dorian, I’m so glad you’re home.”
“Home,” she said, because she realized that it didn’t really matter that he had moved her belongings out of La Roacherie. It didn’t matter where they were; her possessions could be anywhere in the whole wide world, but home was where Deke was.
“We’ve been apart too long,” he said into her hair. “I’ve been wanting you, and you’ve been wanting me, and we don’t have to wait any longer. Come to bed, Dorian, my love.”
She didn’t speak. She couldn’t. As if by magic she felt herself lifted and borne away in his strong arms to be set down upon lacy sheets strewn with white rose petals. Every surface in the room bloomed with white roses—in crystal vases, silver vases, porcelain vases. And candles. The room was lit with a hundred candles, shimmering and gilding their skin with translucent light.
“Candlelight and roses for your homecoming,” he murmured as the scent enveloped them, and her heart lightened with joy. He had missed her and he had planned this for their first night together after being apart for a week. It would have been a wonderful reunion if not for the awful misunderstanding.
It was a dreamlike state in which she watched as her lover slowly undressed her, one piece of clothing after another. He took his time about it, and she didn’t speak, only watching him with enormous eyes as he unsnapped snaps and unbuttoned buttons. She thought he would never finish.
At last she lay naked before him, and he caressed her with his eyes before he leaned over and kissed her stomach. Her sigh seemed to intensify his need, and she was dazzled as his lips seared her flesh, then slid downward.
She started to sit up. “Don’t move,” he said. His tongue and lips drove her relentlessly, ruthlessly, into first an aching pleasure, then an urgent necessity, and as his mouth dipped into her sweetness, she heard herself cry his name. Losing all contact with reality, she surrendered completely, wishing it could go on forever.
Her climax rose on a great shuddering wave of heat, and she wanted nothing so much as for him to join her in the experience. Her breath escaped in a ragged sob when she realized that for her it was over and for him it had not yet begun.
He knew, he always knew what she wanted, and as soon as her passion was spent, he lifted himself above her, teasing until she grasped him and pulled him into her. Again and again he thrust until she began to move with him, matching him gasp for gasp, moaning his name in an exultant wave of rapture.
Never had she made love with anyone who was every bit her equal in passion and skill. With Deke, it was as if she had found her other half, the perfect person to fulfill her every longing. This must be what the love songs were all about, she thought dimly as she felt him move within her. This must be what everything was all about.
He trembled and cried out her name, and she wrapped her legs and arms around him, wanting nothing so much as to be consumed by him. She never could have imagined how close she could feel to another human being and how deeply affecting the physical expression of that closeness could be.
Afterward, their skin fragrant with the scent of crushed roses, he cradled her head in the hollow of his shoulder. The candles had burned low, their flames guttering and winking out one by one. They savored their pleasure in an exquisite consciousness of the moment.
“If only you could understand how much it means to me to have you close by,” he said. “I think about you all the time, Dorian. I told you you’re my all-time fantasy, and part of it is to be able to reach out and touch you. Like this,” he said, reaching to cup his hand around her breast. His thumb brushed her nipple, still swollen from his kisses.
“When you do that, I can’t think,” she murmured. She parted her thighs so that he could slide his hips between them, and she was engulfed in sensation as he framed her face with his hands, gazing at her in rapt adoration.
“I guess now isn’t a good time to ask you if you want to look at that apartment,” he murmured.
She caressed his cheek. “Tomorrow will be soon enough.”
“You’ll stay the night?” His eyes locked into hers, an intense, eloquent plea.
“I didn’t bring my nightgown. It’s in my suitcase, in the car.”
The weight of his body pressed her into the mattress. “You won’t need it. You won’t be wearing anything but rose petals—and me,” he said roughly, and she gasped in astonishment as he entered her again.
They made love all night long, sleeping and waking, waking and sleeping. It was a rare thing they had, this relationship of theirs. Deke could be so exasperating, so unthinking—and then in the next moment, he would do or say something that would make her heart swell with happiness. What she felt for him was so special and so rare that she was afraid to give it a name.
Dorian felt the feelings, but she could not say the words. And Deke did not, either.
She didn’t know if he didn’t feel it, or if, like her, he was simply too terrified to speak the three most elusive words in the English language: I love you.
Chapter Eleven
Jill came over the next day as Dorian was taking great pleasure in lining up her many new pairs of shoes in the roomy walk-in closet in her new sixth-floor apartment at the Europa.
“Nice place you have here,” Jill said, taking in the floor-to-ceiling windows and the cushy white carpet. “Not a roach in sight.”
“And not likely to be, either,” Dorian said, dusting off her hands as she emerged from the closet.
“Did you and Deke get things straightened out?” Jill asked.
Dorian shrugged. “More or less,” she said, avoiding Jill’s eyes.
“I never thought...” Jill began, but her voice trailed off.
Dorian rested her hands on her hips, her head tilted to one side.
“Out with it. What did you never think?” she asked briskly.
“That you’d give in to a guy the way you’ve given in to Deke Washburn,” Jill said in a rush.
Dorian blinked. “Well, I did need an apartment.”
“Yes, but—”
“It’s not like I’m going to be his kept woman or anything,” Dorian pointed out. “I’m paying the rent, and I’ll be out of here in six months when the woman who owns it comes back.”
Jill regarded her with exasperation. “As if I really believe that.”
“Jill,” Dorian said. “Why does this upset you?”
“Because he finds ways to get around you. Nice as he is, Deke always gets his own way in the end, doesn’t he?”
“He only has the best motives,” Dorian said in Deke’s defense.
“So did Godzilla,” Jill said, making for the door.
“Godzilla?”
“Before he chewed up a couple of Japanese villages. Don’t you watch late-night monster movies on TV?”
Dorian smiled, remembering the night before when she and Deke had probably broken some all-time records for the number of times they had made love.
“No, I don’t watch TV anymore” was all she said.
“Well, as long as you’re happy with Deke, that’s what counts. I’d better go before they miss me at work. Dorian...”
“Yes?”
Jill looked uncomfortable. “I’m a little jealous that you’re spending so much time with Deke. You used to always have time to take in a movie or go shopping, and now whenever I ask you, you’re busy.”
“Oh, Jill, it’s not only Deke. It’s the new job and everything. You and I have a date for lunch next week. Why don’t you bring Sandra along so I can get to know her better?”
Jill brightened. “I will. And—and Dor, I really like your new apartment. Deke did a good job in finding it for you.”
“Didn’t he?” Dorian agreed, pleased that Jill was finally expressing her approval.
Jill left with a cheery wave, and Do
rian reflected for a moment on the obligations of friendship. Jill was right; her relationship with Deke had become so time-consuming that she almost didn’t have a life of her own anymore. That would have to change. Deke couldn’t be allowed to run everything.
She stowed her sweaters in the dresser drawers and looked around her in satisfaction. She was finished moving in, and she loved the apartment. Deke had certainly been right about that.
It hadn’t been hard to decide to stay as soon as she saw the big closets and the bright modern kitchen. The apartment was exactly what she had been looking for, and with the Dr. Feelgood’s media blitz revving up, Dorian had no spare time left for apartment-hunting. She regarded the place as the solution to a problem.
Dorian was perfectly aware that Jill regarded the place as a symptom of a problem. However, Jill didn’t understand. Well, from now on Dorian would make more of an effort to keep track of her own friends. Now that she was being catapulted into the limelight, she needed her friends more than ever to help her keep her perspective.
* * *
DEKE WAS DELIGHTED that Dorian now lived downstairs in his own building. It was fun to drop in on her whenever he liked, and he gave her a key to the penthouse so that she could walk in and out as she pleased. It was a source of pleasure to look up from whatever he was doing and see her there, decorating his penthouse and his life. He couldn’t imagine what he had spent his time doing before he knew her.
What with his busy work schedule while he built his company, Deke had never noticed the lack of companionship in his life. Now, with less to do, when Dorian wasn’t present, he felt bereft. He didn’t like being apart from her for any length of time, and he was never so lonely as he was when she went to New York City to appear on “Sun-up,” a national talk show, a week after she moved into the Europa.
He’d never felt so proud of anyone in his life as he watched on his own TV as Dorian walked out onto the “Sun-up” set. She wore a slithery rose-colored silk dress that clung in all the right places. The low scoop neckline revealed the soft hollow at the base of her throat, the very place that Deke liked to nuzzle before he kissed her breasts. He wasn’t sure he liked sharing that hollow with the whole world, even if no one could touch.
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