No secret doors. No hunks. Her personal parts throbbed.
There was no furniture in the “treatment room” besides a big brass bed, a breakfast table and chair, and a hotel night-table. The bed looked like a museum piece, high and pouffy, with the coverlet turned down and piles of fat pillows against the brass rails. She walked around the bed, looking for hidden wires. Underneath, it was just a bed—some leaf springs, the mattress.
The wires could be hidden up inside one of these brass tubes. She should have waited, should have gone back to the office and fetched a voltmeter and a few other tools. Next time.
There’d be no next time if she could bust his butt today.
When he’d grabbed for her credit card as soon as she’d stepped inside the door, she was sure she would get him today. Now, not so sure.
She gave in to temptation and sat down on the bed. Pint-sized Nina probably had to climb. Eww. Don’t think about Nina in this bed. Nina had been in this bed less than two hours ago.
Jewel’s feet hurt so much, they tingled. She tingled all over. Battle-nerves, she kidded herself.
Sheets were clean anyway.
She let her pumps slide to the floor and swung her tired feet up onto the coverlet.
Nice coverlet. Four-hundred-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets. The goose-down pillows—she sank back—grabbed her and held her, safe, seductive, tempting her to let go.
Her brain skittered around. She thought about Nina’s messed-up marriage and her heart bled for Ed, a thing she wouldn’t have thought possible. She had to nail this smoothie. How dare he suggest his treatment was too much for her! Treatment my ass, she thought, picturing his smug smile melting into dismay when she walked out of here three hours from now with a sheaf of citations in his name.
But she couldn’t imagine a happy ending for Nina’s problem. Jewel felt drowsy with sheer frustration.
She pulled her watch off and set the timer for two and a half hours. I’ll doze. Let the tequila wear off.
She lay back again, letting the pillows engulf her.
If Clay actually knew so darned much about what women wanted, he wouldn’t be so annoying. Why did some guys think a woman had to be pissed off to be aroused? She’d like to show him what it felt like. Not in the least sexy.
She stood in the staff room, pointer in hand. Clay posed naked before the whiteboard while she pointed at the crinkly laugh-at-you eyes, the smug pouty mouth, the shaggy blond bangs that screamed I don’t have a job!
He didn’t get it. He smirked and made Mr. Buff poses.
Nobody was listening anyway. Except the hunk at the back.
I must be dreaming. No buff guys ever came within a thousand miles of the Department of Consumer Services. She looked across the conference table at the hunk’s unbelievably beefy shoulders and the set of his noble head, like the head of a particularly elegant horse, all dark masculine strength and grace.
He looked right at her. She was definitely dreaming. With all the perky size-five investigators in the room, he was looking at a six-foot, size-eighteen dairy farmer’s daughter? He’d be wasted on the size fives. Here was a man big enough for her.
He stood up and beckoned to her. Man, oh, man was he big. The size fives disappeared, along with the Supervisors in Charge of Talking Slowly at Meetings and the doughnuts and coffee. Good thing, because he was reaching across the table and dragging her by the shoulders into his arms. She was startled at how warm and real his hands felt on her shoulders. In a dream you expect something vague.
Nothing vague about his kiss. Masterful and hot, and yet his lips were cushiony.
She reveled in the dream kiss, letting her back melt against him, letting herself droop across the conference table as if her bodice were being ripped away by a medieval knight, a hunky half-naked medieval knight who kneaded her bare breasts with strong, hot hands, oh, man, oh man!
“Where did you come from?” she murmured when his mouth lifted from hers.
“Eighteen-eleven,” he said back, which she could have told him wasn’t medieval at all, it was one of those dumb periods where America was almost at war over something so dumb nobody remembered any more, and the clothes were awful.
“Not that you need clothes,” she murmured. She reached over her head to stroke the veined curve of his pectoral muscle, silky-smooth yet hard.
“Do you want me?” he said, a little formally under the circumstances. His hot, lusty black eyes turned anxious.
“Sure.”
That didn’t seem to be the right answer. “That’s it?” he said more anxiously. “Sure?”
“If you want twelve lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter,” she said impatiently, “ask me in the morning.” What was his problem? He was the one who had beckoned to her, stripped her half-naked on the conference table, and stuck his tongue down her throat. “Can we get back to the conference table?”
“Very well, Miss—you are single, aren’t you? What’s your name?”
“Jewel, and yes I’m single. The table?”
He sighed. “I’m Randolph, but everyone calls me Randy.” He reached for her hand and drew her up to him. His fingers brushed her forehead. “Close your eyes. Tell me all about yourself.”
His touch was everything she remembered from the staff room: A licking flame, a single wailing electric guitar note dragged across her nerves like a sexual wake-up call, an undertow of lust that sucked her back into dreamland, back into his arms. “That’s more like it,” she said, and fell deeper asleep.
They flew out of a broken corner in the window and circled the hotel from above. “I’m afraid of heights,” she said. He made her hold onto the edge of the giant rooftop flag and, while the wind snapped and flung her around like a kite-tail, he blew in her ear like the lake breeze, he ran cool like rain all over her body, he called like a gull, here I come, he entered her like lightning and lit up every cell in her body at once and she screamed and laughed and begged for more.
“Are you aroused because you’re afraid, or afraid because you’re aroused?”
“Oh, who knows,” she said crossly. “That Jewel girl. Kinky as an old fence.”
He held her from behind in strong arms, letting her look down, down on Lake Shore Drive and the beach with its lacy fringe of surf. Her heart hammered. “Be gentle with her,” he murmured against her neck, making her shiver. “Even I didn’t know I could do this. I could learn so much from your imagination. Pity you’re only here for three hours.”
Gentle, she thought. I am never gentle with myself. “Learn from her? That girl hasn’t got a clue.” She felt his belly warm against her naked back, felt the wind, stiff and cold up here, making goose bumps along her arms and legs. Felt his cock against the backs of her thighs. “She wouldn’t believe if you stuffed her clothes up the chimney. She wouldn’t believe if you autographed her pussy.”
He flew her back into the staff room, where they put the conference table to excellent use, and then she remembered some wack stories from a mythology book, and he proved that you could, too, have sex with a giant swan. Screaming the whole time, she drove her hands among the feathers on his breast, searching out and clinging to the bony parts, while he pounded the air with his wings, hovering, entering her with each downstroke. He could reach everywhere with that long neck. The air conditioning chilled her butt and his feathers slid over her front, making her think of slipping away, of falling, so that she yanked herself harder onto his weird poky member, trying to hold on with her pussy muscles. He hissed in her ear through his beak, “You love it. You love it.” She thought she would never come, and then she did, and they fell from the ceiling to the bed with a thump that knocked the wind out of her.
She opened her eyes. She wheezed, trying to suck air.
Long white feathers showered up, then fluttered down.
The black-eyed hunk lay on top of her. His elbow stuck in her gizzard. He was sweaty and stinky. She got claustrophobic at his nearness.
“Get off me!” she wheezed.
>
Randy sat up on top of her, one hand on his chest. His eyes bugged out. He held up the hand, turning it and staring at it, and then he looked at her.
Get away from me! She couldn’t say it. She couldn’t breathe.
Finally she sucked in enough air.
She screamed.
He screamed.
He vanished.
The weight lifted off her pelvis. She sat up, panting. “Where—” No Randy. Just a scattering of unnaturally long white feathers all over the bed and the carpet.
Then the feathers melted away.
She flopped back down on the bed and stared at the ceiling. Six feet above the table by the window hung an oddly ugly chandelier. She squinted. “That looks like my pants. My God.” She sat up again. Her hair was plastered to her with sweat, and she stank of sex. “I’m naked. How did I get naked?”
The alarm on her wristwatch went off. She squeaked.
In thirty minutes, the con artist Clay Dawes was going to knock on the door, and she had to be ready to cite him.
Trying hard not to think how they got there, she retrieved her polyester pants from the breakfast-table chandelier, her matching jacket and shell from the top of the drapes, and her bra and panties from cornices on the crown molding twelve feet in the air. She found only one shoe.
Totally demoralized, she went to the bathroom for a shower.
The second shoe was in the sink.
In the medicine-cabinet mirror, she saw bright red writing all over her face.
She screamed again.
She lifted her hands to her face. “What—what—wha—” The writing was backwards. Panicked breathless, she squinted at the mirror.
Beside her right eye was written in small, neat letters, and here.
“And here? And here? What—wha—” It was written beside her mouth. And at the hollow of her throat. And—she tipped her face to one side, staring wall-eyed out of the corner of her eye—under her left ear. And here. What the—? And here what?
It wasn’t her handwriting, either.
She whirled to the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door. Another scream escaped her throat.
Her body was written on, all over. Not quite her whole body. Her breasts, in a circle around her nipples, and the soles of her feet, and a line of writing that ran up the inside of her right leg and disappeared from view. She stood up quickly and banged her head on the sink.
She swallowed. Had Clay snuck into the room and scrawled all over her while she lay dead to the world, dreaming of—
“Oh no!”
Dreaming of a Viking-size hunk with hot black eyes like a doberman sailing over the back fence.
Speaking of dobermans at the back fence. She recalled more of her dream. He’d bent her over the conference table and done something else that reminded her of dogs, did it until she howled and wriggled and yelped and whined and begged. She throbbed with leftover bliss.
And when they were both too tired to move anymore, she had suggested that he should sign his work.
They’d lolled naked on the conference table. They’d taken turns with the overhead-projector markers.
Swallowing hard, Jewel turned hesitantly and looked into the mirror over her shoulder.
There on her behind, in huge, smudgy red letters, she read—backwards—randy on her left butt cheek, was on her tailbone, and here on her right butt cheek.
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Walking on Sunshine Page 39
