Max saw Blythe waiting at the elevator

He slowed, giving himself the pleasure of simply looking at her in the little black dress. No more than a slip, really, and it hugged every curve.

If he closed his eyes, he could remember exactly how the curves had felt in his hands.

He quickened his step, moving silently, and sneaked up behind her. “You’re not escaping from me,” he whispered into her ear.

Blythe jumped and shivered in his arms. “Go back to the party,” she said, sounding panicked. “What if my roommate catches you?”

Max started to tell her exactly how little he cared if Candy caught them, but realized he had a much better use for their few stolen minutes. Gently he turned her toward him and bent his head way, way down to kiss her. She moaned and wrapped her arms around his neck.

The elevator came and he backed her into it. His fingertips were at the hem of her skirt before the doors closed….

Dear Reader,

The words When the Lights Go Out once conjured up images of romance, mystery and excitement in my mind. During last August’s East Coast blackout, those words took on a whole new meaning. In Manhattan where I live, no lights also meant no stoplights at the intersections, no subways, no trains to the suburbs, packed buses, closed groceries and restaurants and no elevators in a city of skyscrapers. Worst of all, there were people in those subways and on those elevators when they ground to a halt.

New York rallied, as it always does. There were unheard-of demonstrations of good manners at those unlighted intersections, and city dwellers invited stranded suburbanites to sleep over. When I discovered my neighbors stuck in the elevator, I’d love to report that I was as levelheaded and resourceful as Blythe Padgett. Alas, my rescue efforts involved a lot of running up and down the stairs while trying to get 911 on the phone, and in between, shouting hysterical words of encouragement down the elevator shaft.

I wonder how many people ended up in the wrong bed like Blythe and found their lives changed forever. That’s something we’ll never know, because they’re not telling. Forgive me, Blythe and Max, for revealing your deep dark secret….

Barbara Daly

bdalybooks@aol.com

Books by Barbara Daly

HARLEQUIN TEMPTATION

859—A LONG HOT CHRISTMAS

887—TOO HOT TO HANDLE

953—MISTLETOE OVER MANHATTAN

When the Lights Go Out…

Barbara Daly

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To all those friends with whom I shared the August 2003 blackout—to the doormen who stayed on, to my husband, George, and our stranded houseguest Eitan for cheerfully eating tuna salad sandwiches for dinner in the dining capital of the United States.

And especially to my neighbors the Pingitores, who retained their elegance and dignity throughout their long ordeal in the elevator, and to those tireless NYPD officers who rescued them.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

1

“WHATCHA GOTTA DO IS gut up and frigging go for it.”

“Frigging?” Blythe Padgett looked up at her best friend, her roommate, her co-worker, her guardian devil. “Very good, Candy. Last month it was effing. You’ve toned it down another notch.”

“Bart’s on my case.” Candy Jacobsen was a tall, beautiful blonde with a mouth as filthy as the pan the mechanic drained your old oil into. Her passion for expletives was only one of the reasons her news stories invariably needed a rewrite, a task Blythe was performing at this very moment, providing Candy the time and space to interfere in her life.

Not that Candy needed much time to interfere in Blythe’s life. Not at any time in the seven years they’d been friends had she ever been too busy to do that.

She didn’t need much space, either. The New York Telegraph offices occupied three floors of a large, undistinguished building in Times Square. City Desk editor Bart Klemp and his crew of reporters and staff, including Blythe and Candy, occupied the fifth floor, which was basically one enormous high-ceilinged room with scuffed hardwood floors and grandly proportioned, infrequently cleaned windows.

At one time, the office had contained nothing more than rows of desks. The sounds of clacking typewriters and jangling phones must have bounced off the walls and ceiling to create a din loud enough to rattle those big windows. Then someone had come up with the bright idea of separate cubicles. These were nothing more than six-feet-high, square doorless partitions made of a porous synthetic material, but they at least gave the illusion of privacy and cut down on the noise level. When someone else came up with the even brighter idea of computers, and phones were engineered to announce incoming calls by flashing or buzzing softly, the result was the busy hum that prevailed outside the cubicle where Blythe was currently trying to fix Candy’s story and Candy was trying to fix Blythe’s life.

Obviously undistracted from her cause, Candy slid off the edge of Blythe’s desk to pace the tiny cubicle a few steps this way and that on her stiletto heels. “If you don’t start strutting your stuff, you’re never going to find another—” she came to a halt, then said “—boyfriend.”

Blythe knew the term Candy had wanted to use, but couldn’t quite bring herself to say “frig-buddy.”

“Because,” Candy said, pointing a long, frosted-pearl fingernail at Blythe, “until you find another guy, you’re not going to get over Thor. You can’t spend your life thinking no man will ever want you just because—”

“His name wasn’t Thor,” Blythe mumbled. “It was Sven.”

“Thor, Sven, who cares? Male meat. Problem was that he was so full of steroids he couldn’t—”

“Candy!” Blythe vengefully deleted cataclysmic and typed in major. It reduced the verve of Candy’s story nicely. Candy could use a bit of verve reduction.

“So what you have to do,” Candy said, “is sleep with somebody. Anybody. Break through the frigging barrier. Then you’ll be okay. Are you about finished with that?”

Candy and Blythe had both landed jobs with the New York Telegraph right out of college. A mere three years later, Candy was a hotshot crime reporter with high hopes of getting a job with the venerable Times. Blythe was still a proofreader. Bart Klemp, the city desk editor, had declared that “Blythe Padgett’s a darned good writer, but she wouldn’t know news if she woke up in bed with it.”

Everybody seemed determined for her to wake up in bed with…something.

Rewrites were currently the biggest thing going on in her life. This one was Candy’s report of a shocking drug bust on a sedate street of town houses in Greenwich Village. As fed up as Blythe felt with the entire world, it was going to read like a story from the Obituaries editor in the cubicle next door when Blythe was finished with it.

“And I’ve got just the guy for you.”

She’d tuned Candy out for a moment, but this statement made her tune swiftly back in. “You what? Who?”

“He grew up next door to me,” Candy said, “so we know he’s not a strangler or an axe murderer.”

“Oh! Wonderful! Those are my top qualifications. Have I ever met him?” One of Candy’s many kindnesses was to take the orphaned Blythe home for holidays. Candy’s family had become her family. In spite of enjoying every privilege money could buy, the Jacobsens were as broken as any family could be and fell just short of being certifiably insane, but any kind of family was better than none. “Oh, no. His parents moved ages ago,” Candy said, “but I kept in touch with him. He’s living in Boston now. I don’t know…he was always sort of special to me, I guess, like the big brother I never had. He’s attractive. And sensitive—for a guy, anyway. I mean, he’s a shrink and a shrink has to be sensitive. He was educated to be sensitive. He gets paid big bucks to be sensitive. I know I can trust him to be nice to you. You could have a few dates and let nature take its course.”

“What’s his—”

“But I have a feeling nature will take its course the second you lay eyes on each other, and he sees what a sexy little hotpot you are.”

Candy was pacing in circles now, and gave Blythe’s curly red hair an affectionate ruffle on her way around the desk, but Blythe still felt irritated. A hotpot was a menu item in a Mongolian restaurant. How could a hotpot be sexy? Candy was really very careless in her use of language. “Candy, come on!” Blythe said, deleting a string of flamboyant adjectives from the news story. “I don’t know anything about this old friend of yours. I might not like him at all.”

“You don’t have to like him. You just have to have sex with him.” Candy fanned herself with a galley proof from the stack on Blythe’s desk. Midafternoon, mid-August, New York—these three factors were more than the air-conditioning in the prewar building that housed the Telegraph offices could handle.

“No way I’d go to bed with a total stranger,” Blythe said firmly. “Certainly not with a man I didn’t like.”

But Candy’s face had taken on a dangerously dreamy expression. “That’s how I lost my virginity,” she said. “I kept saving it and saving it, because my mother said I should save myself for the right man.”

It sounded comfortably motherly, but Candy’s mother still seemed to be looking for the right man—and having gone through three husbands in the search, the evidence pointed strongly toward the likelihood that she hadn’t been saving herself.

“But there never was the right man,” Candy went on like a voice-over to Blythe’s thoughts, “and I saw myself getting older and older without finding him. One day I said, ‘You’ve got to start somewhere.’ So I went straight for the quarterback, not a total stranger, but let’s just say we’d never talked. I’m not sure he knew how to.”

Wellesley, where the two of them had gone to college, Blythe on a National Merit scholarship, was still a women’s college and didn’t have a football team. “How old were you?” Blythe asked, changing “biggest haul of the decade” to “confiscation of a large amount of product.”

“Fifteen.”

“Fifteen! No wonder you panicked!” Blythe removed one last random comma from Candy’s story and sent the file to the printer. “I bet you’re sorry now that you settled for the high school quarterback.”

“Sorry? Honey, it made me what I am today, as sexually healthy as the horse that man was hung like. Whoo. I still get wet just thinking about him.” She licked her lips.

Blythe tried not to pinch her lips together. “Well, thanks for telling me about your friend. What did you say his name—”

“I told him about you, too.”

“Candy, you can’t do that!”

“I can and did.” Candy looked too smug.

“What exactly did you do?” Thinking of the myriad possibilities, the limitless nature of Candy’s imagination, made Blythe intensely nervous.

“Told him you and he should get together. And guess what? He’s coming to New York for a conference.”

“When?”

“Today.”

“How nice. I’m sure the conference will keep him very busy. But maybe sometime in the distant future…”

“Tonight,” Candy said.

“What?”

“Tonight. You have a date with him tonight. Seven o’clock. I’m going to tell my date to meet me here, give you two some frigging—”

Blythe levitated out of her chair and ripped the last page out of the printer so fast the ink trailed down into the margin. “That’s it,” she said. “Now you’ve gone too far.”

“Thanks,” Candy said, grabbing the pages out of Blythe’s hands. “Face it, Blythe, you needed a push.”

“A push, maybe! Not my sad story laid before a total stranger! Not a date with a man who assumes I’m desperate to jump in the sack with him!” She held out her hands in supplication. “We should meet for lunch first, no, coffee first, then lunch. No, talk on the phone first, then coffee, then lunch. We should have e-mailed before he even called me on the phone.”

“Blythe, Blythe…” Candy shook her head. “You’re too frigging conservative.”

“I must have been born that way. It sure wasn’t parental influence,” Blythe said stubbornly, plunking herself back down in her chair. Her parents had died in an automobile accident before they’d had a chance to influence her one way or the other. Although losing them had had a profound influence on what she wanted out of her own life.

“I know, I know,” Candy said, heaving a dramatic sigh of resignation. “Okay, we’ll do it your way. I’ll call him and tell him to ask you out for coffee tomorrow instead. Hope I can reach him.” She glanced at her watch, and her inch-long nails glittered as she moved them around in the fluorescent light of the newsroom. “God a’mighty. I gotta get outta here and cover a takedown in the Bronx.”

As Candy took off at warp speed, Blythe took note of her working clothes—a shrunken-looking cream T-shirt, a natural linen skirt too short to bend over in and a pair of bone-colored, spike-heeled pumps that came to a sharp point well beyond her toes. She resembled a rope of taffy. Blythe chased her to the door of the newsroom. “You sure you want to take the subway up to the Bronx in that outfit?”

Candy paused long enough to look down at herself. “Think I should take a cab? Nope, takes too long.”

She took off again. Blythe gazed after her for a moment, then went slowly back to her desk. As sexually healthy as the horse that man was hung like. As sexually healthy as the horse like which that man was hung.

She blew a nasty-sounding raspberry at the computer. Candy interfered because she cared about her. Blythe knew this, would never forget how Candy had become her champion the moment Blythe entered the freshman class at Wellesley with absolutely nothing going for her but her brains. She didn’t know why she’d awakened Candy’s sympathy, but under Candy’s wing Blythe had blossomed—at least, as much as she was ever going to blossom. She’d made friends, joined clubs, learned to girl-talk, learned to laugh. Still, at times she wished Candy would back off and let her be miserable. This was one of those times.

Resigned, she picked up a stack of galleys and focused her gaze on them. Suddenly, with a flash of monitors going black as computers shut down and the grinding sound of air-conditioning coming to a halt, the world dimmed.

From her cubicle Blythe could hear the newsroom catapulting into chaos. “What the hell?” somebody shouted.

“I’ve lost my story!” came from the Obituaries editor next door.

Blythe got up and darted around the corner to comfort him. “In a minute the generator will kick in,” she assured the hysterical young man who was still staring at his screen and jabbing at the enter key as if that would bring back his golden prose. “You won’t lose the whole story.”

Everyone else in the newsroom seemed to have gotten up at once. Reporters and editors were milling around like a herd of sheep, consulting each other, wringing hands or trying to act blasé. Someone began raising the blinds they’d closed earlier against the searing sunshine, and the omnipresent dust of Manhattan swirled in the harsh rays.

One by one the staffers picked up their phones to find them dead, then stabbed at the keys of their cell phones, only to slam them down in frustration.

Silence fell just as suddenly as the chaos had erupted when their shepherd, Bart Klemp, plodded out from his office at the end of the room, a private office with a door and actual walls that went all the way to the ceiling.

Blythe was reminded of movies in which the benevolent plant-eating brontosaurus moved across the landscape, making the earth tremble with each ponderous step. This was a very odd comparison because Bart wasn’t a particularly tall man and he was chunky rather than obese. It was something in his attitude. Bart always looked as if he and his entire species were about to go extinct, and the thought made him terribly sad.

“I’ve been listening to the radio,” he said, “and the power’s out.”

We know that much without listening to a radio.

Bart’s face turned scarlet. Everybody must have been giving him the same “Duh!” look Blythe probably had on her face. “What I mean is,” Bart said, “that it’s not just us. It’s the power grid that serves the whole East Coast, Toronto south to Maryland and west into Michigan.”

The buzz in the newsroom was like a crowd-noise sound effect on an old radio show.

“Here on the home front, the generator’s not working, either, and the phone system’s down—they need electricity from somewhere, apparently. Anybody wants a briefing in electrical engineering, don’t look at me. All I know is nothing’s working at the Telegraph, and those of you still putting stories together, you’re going to have a hard time getting a circuit on your cell phones.”

Blythe still didn’t have a cell phone, and while she reflected that it really was well past time to be the last on the block to get one, Bart paused to rest a beefy hand on a desk and go even more fully into collapse mode. “I don’t know who’s going to show up from the night crew, so I’d appreciate it if some of you guys would stick around, see what we can pull together for a paper tomorrow afternoon if we get the power back in time. We’ve got radios to get the news, find out if it’s a terrorist attack or a lightning strike or somebody just screwed up, so there’s no excuse for us not to have those stories ready to print just as fast as the Times will.”

Blythe had her hand halfway up in the air. This was a dream come true—not that she was happy the entire East Coast had to suffer on behalf of one of her dreams—but this was her chance. Help get the paper out under impossible conditions. Save the day. Be a hero. Be indispensable.

But Bart wasn’t asking for volunteers. He was reading off a list of names. Hers wasn’t on it.

There it was, in actions that spoke louder than words. She wasn’t indispensable. Not that she didn’t know she wasn’t indispensable to the Telegraph, but it still hurt to have it confirmed. Gone, gone were her dreams of spending a few years being a latter-day Lois Lane, dashing about the city to uncover the facts for a front page story, always on a tight deadline while the entire newsroom waited with bated breath for her return, because if she didn’t get the story, the Telegraph would die a humiliating death in bankruptcy and all would be lost.

That part of the dream she’d have to revise to suit the power outage, but the second part remained intact. That at the end of an endless day, victorious, having saved the paper, she’d go home to her own personal superhero.

Crumpling inside, she turned toward her cubicle to get her handbag. In the background, she heard the political editor ask Bart, “When was our new guy supposed to land? I was counting on him to get out the columns on this City Council scandal…”

Counting on him. When would anybody ever count on her?

Feeling useless and defeated, Blythe walked down the four flights of stairs and onto the street. The subway system wasn’t working obviously, but the buses were. Perhaps a hundred people were waiting at the first bus stop. Twenty minutes later, after several already-stuffed buses had passed them by, flashing the Wait for Next Bus sign, she decided to splurge on a taxi and moved to the middle of the block to flag one down. Fifteen minutes worth of already-occupied taxis later, she knew walking was her only option.

Walking was dangerous. It gave her time to think.

Her stomach lurched with worry. Poor Candy. Was she all right? Was she one of the terrified people stuck on subway trains in the dark and the heat? How would she ever get home? Candy’s poor friend, the shrink. Blythe hadn’t even wrung his name out of Candy, and now she might never meet him.

What was he like, Candy’s friend? You’d expect Candy’s friends to be dingbats, but the ones Blythe had met on those holiday visits had been quite nice people, Candy being the wild child among them. So he probably was nice. And sensitive.

If she’d let Candy have her own way and the power hadn’t gone out and her friend had arrived for his blind therapy session with Blythe—you could hardly call it a date—she would have handled it in her own way. She would have offered him a drink and explained to him that, as fond as they both were of Candy, he ought to know that his friend had grown up to be a nutcase, an instant-gratification freak, a steamroller with no brakes. Well, no, it wouldn’t do to criticize an old friend. She’d put the blame on herself instead.

“I’m delighted to meet you, of course,” she would have said, “but Candy overreacted to my little, ah, problem. You mustn’t feel any obligation to take me out.” And don’t even think about taking me to bed.

And he might have said, “Ha, ha. Candy overreact? You must be joking.” And they might have had a good laugh together and maybe met for coffee sometime.

But this pleasant little exchange wasn’t likely to happen. Blythe didn’t like thinking about what might have happened to Candy’s friend.

His plane might be speeding desperately toward an airport where the air traffic controllers had electricity and the runway had lights, knowing the gas gauge was sinking lower, lower, lower. He’d feel the plane begin to lose altitude and think regretfully of the wild affair he might have had with Candy’s little redheaded roommate, a spitfire, a hot-blooded sex goddess, cursing fate for what he’d missed out on.

Blythe took in a sharp breath. He might have crashed while he was cursing fate.

Now he’d never know the truth, that the only thing hot about her was her hair color. That and her passion for correct spelling and good grammar.

Or he might still be at Logan Airport, simply cursing because his flight had been canceled. Wherever he was, she felt he must be cursing. How could he have grown up next door to Candy without being a world-class composer of creative expletives?

Blythe stopped daydreaming long enough to take stock of where she was. She’d almost done the cross-town part of her journey home. Now for the uptown part. She’d keep walking while she watched for a bus or a taxi. Just thirty-five blocks. Thirty-five blocks was nothing more than a good morning walk. Good afternoon walk. What time was it, anyway? Her watchband had slid around on her sweaty wrist, and she scooted it back. It was nearly six. Okay, thirty-five blocks was a good evening constitutional.

She had plenty of company. The sidewalks were packed in midtown, then thinned out as she moved up Madison Avenue into the East Sixties, where limousine drivers were delivering their wealthy employers home to their town houses. The heat and humidity weighed her down, so she paused occasionally for rest and window-shopping at stores that were closed down, had probably closed immediately after the blackout for security reasons, or to give their owners and managers a slight chance of making it home. Sweating in her flowered skirt and coral T-shirt, shopping didn’t grab her attention.

She ought to look for another job, go somewhere she could feel successful, but she was scared to confront a break in her steady salary and benefits. She was alone in the big city.

She was alone in the big world was what she was. Or would be, if it weren’t for Candy.

If she got any more maudlin, she’d sound like a character in a soap opera. She’d be okay. She could take care of herself. She’d worked hard. That scholarship had given her an excellent education. She just hadn’t found the right job yet, that was all.

Her smile faded as she had a fleeting vision of herself in jeans and a sweatshirt, loading a host of bright-eyed children into a station wagon in the driveway of a spotless, warm and cheery white clapboard house in the suburbs that still smelled of the bacon and eggs she’d cooked for breakfast, the tuna fish sandwiches she’d lovingly packed in their lunch boxes along with rosy apples and bags of chips. This was her other dream, a dream far more important than the Lois-Lane-saves-the-paper dream.

What she really wanted was to be a wife and mother. In her spare time she might write a weekly column in the local newspaper, something on housekeeping. Or parenting. She’d volunteer at her kids’ school, of course, and might even run for City Council in a quiet little suburb in Connecticut or New Jersey where the major issues were fence height and lawn maintenance. She’d keep her brain active, but the children—and her superhero—would come first.

This was a secret she kept in her heart. She didn’t have a single friend, especially not Candy, who would understand. The aggressive, career-oriented women of Manhattan would view homemaking as a nightmare. To Blythe, who’d never had a home and family, it sounded like heaven on earth.

Unfortunately the scene needed a handsome, loving, sexy man to kiss goodbye while the kids piled into the car, a man who could understand and support her dream and even express his love for her and the children by boiling the eggs for the tuna fish salad. She’d find that man someday. Just not quite yet.

At long last, she stepped gratefully into the lobby of the building where she and Candy shared an apartment, expecting the relief of a delicious blast of air-conditioning when, of course, there wasn’t any.

Santiago, the day doorman, was still on the job. “Miss Padgett.” He sounded relieved. “You made it home.”

“Just barely,” she croaked. “All I want is a nice long shower—we do have water, don’t we?”

An uneasy look came over his face. “We have water.” He cleared his throat. “Not necessarily hot water, but water. What we don’t have is elevators.”

She and Candy lived on the twenty-third floor. “I thought the elevators had an emergency backup system.”

He shuffled his feet. “It’s not working. Guess it has to get electricity from somewhere.”

She’d already heard this from Bart. “I know,” she said kindly. “If I want a lesson in electrical engineering, I’ll have to get it from somebody else. Okay, so I’ll walk up.”

“It’s dark, and I mean dark, in the stairwells,” Santiago went on. “I bought all the flashlights the hardware store down the street had left. Take one. First come, first served. I’d walk up with you, but J.R. and I are the only staff here. We stayed on because the night shift didn’t make it in.”

She took a moment to send out hugs to people stranded on subways, stuck in elevators, hoping Candy wasn’t among them. “Have they closed the bridges and tunnels?”

Santiago nodded. “Eddie called in,” he said. “He can’t get out of Brooklyn.”

That definitely took care of her date-under-duress. “I knew we’d live to regret the age of technology,” Blythe said as she headed for the stairs that spiraled up through the building and ended closest to hers and Candy’s apartment. She opened the door and almost lost heart. With no windows in the stairwell, no light reached it at all. But it was the only way home. Grasping her flashlight, she aimed it up into the darkness and got her feet moving.

Second floor, third, fourth, fifth…

She’d never buy a StairMaster. Who needed one, as undependable as New York was.

Sixth, seventh, eighth…

When she’d trapped a wonderful husband and delivered numerous adorable children to worry about, she’d be grateful she’d opted for that house in suburbia. Two floors, three, max. She could hear some noise going on above her. It was comforting, knowing other people were in the building. She wouldn’t have that in suburbia, but then she wouldn’t be climbing twenty-two flights of dark stairs, either.

Ninth, tenth, eleventh…

The higher she climbed, the worse she felt about Candy’s friend. Now, thinking of him in a state of crisis, or worse, she wished she’d been more receptive to Candy’s idea, had let him take her into his arms, kiss her, let nature take its course, just as Candy had assured her it would.

At least pestered Candy for his “frigging” name!

She frowned. The heat and isolation were getting to her. She hadn’t done anything bad to Candy’s friend yet. She couldn’t have taken him into her arms and let nature take its course because he hadn’t gotten there. She still had time to make things right. Feeling she’d had a narrow escape from a level of guilt she’d never get over, she collapsed on the first step leading up to the twelfth floor, drew her knees up, rested her forehead on them and closed her eyes, reflecting on the true value of certain New York status symbols, the Upper East Side apartment, the higher floor.

The noise from above had increased in volume. She suddenly realized that what she was hearing was not the voices of neighbors but frantic pounding and shouting. It galvanized her into action. She could feel her hair standing on end. Someone was being attacked, maybe killed! What manners, to mug somebody during a crisis! And in such a nice, safe building! Was there no honor among thieves anymore?

She had a whistle and a can of Mace she’d carried around in her handbag for two years without needing them. She hoped they still worked. Where was the shouting coming from? She hated to retrace a single precious step. She’d start on the twelfth floor. Dredging up one last burst of energy, she raced up the steps and encountered a locked door.

Locked for security reasons, of course. She was pretty sure one of the keys she’d been issued when she and Candy moved in unlocked the stairwell doors. As the pounding intensified and the shouts grew louder, she searched the depths of her handbag for the ring of keys, found them and began jabbing them at the keyhole one at a time. At least the guy was still fighting off the mugger. A key fit, turned and she barreled out into the twelfth-floor hallway, shining her flashlight to the left and to the right, yelling, “Hands up! I’ve got you covered!”

The shouting stopped. The hall was silent. Nobody was being mugged that she could see. “Hello?” she said timidly. “Is somebody up here.”

“Yes.”

The voice came from right behind her and several feet above her. Blythe screamed. The flashlight flew out of her hands and the hallway plunged into total darkness.

2

“WHO SAID THAT? Where are you?” On her hands and knees, Blythe scrambled blindly for the flashlight. Her hand closed on it and she clutched it gratefully to her bosom, then remembered why she loved it so much and turned it back on.

“I’m in the elevator. Where did you think I was?”

She shone the light on the bank of elevators. “Which one?” she said. Her voice was shaking. She pounded on the first doors. “In here?” The second. It sent back a hollow sound. “Here?”

She was moving on to the third when she heard, “Stop, damn it. I’m right here in the middle.”

She stepped back. “Are you okay?”

There was a silence, then, “No, I’m not okay. I’m stuck in the elevator.”

“Besides that,” Blythe said.

“That’s enough,” he said.

“How long have you been in there?”

“Since the lights went out! Can we end the quiz? Is there a way to get out of here?”

She was calming down because she knew the answer to this one. “Yes,” she said, speaking slowly as if he were a child. “You pick up the emergency phone and say—”

“It’s not working. Neither are the lights. It’s really, really dark in here.”

Nothing is working, Bart had said. She was beginning to grasp the idea. “We’ve had a major power outage,” she said, “but we’ll get you out of there. Don’t you worry. Dial 9-1-1. Do you have a cell phone? Because I don’t.”

“I can’t get a signal.”

“I’ll go back downstairs,” she said at last, groaning at the very thought, “and see if J.R. or Santiago has something to pry open the doors.”

“No. Don’t leave.”

She paused. The man was admitting he was frightened. Claustrophobic, maybe. Or just a man trapped for hours in an inky-black box with no connection to the outside world until she’d come. He needed her. Some strong, unidentifiable feeling surged up in her heart. He actually needed her. She couldn’t let him down. “Okay, I won’t. Maybe I have something in my bag.”

“Can you see anything?”

“I have a flashlight.”

“Oh. A flashlight. I’d kill for a flashlight.”

Poor guy. She aimed the light at the doors. “Can you see this?”

“What?”

“A ray of light.”

“No.”

Some quality of his voice made her dump the contents of her handbag out on the hall carpet and aim the flashlight at the pile. She had a nail file. Still on the floor, she thrust it through the opening in the doors and wiggled it. “Can you see my nail file?”

“I can’t see anything.”

“Well, can you feel it?”

“Aim it higher. You sound like you’re way below me. The elevator must have stopped between floors.”

She stood and reached as high as she could to wiggle the file in.

“There it is!” He sounded like Columbus spotting land. She felt a tug on the file. “It’s not going to move the doors, though. Got anything bigger? Wait a minute. I’ve got a Swiss Army knife.”

“You have a knife?”

A spurt of air, something like a snort, came from above her head. “Everybody has a Swiss Army knife. Chill, okay? The knife doesn’t belong in the lead paragraph.”

It was an odd coincidence that he’d used a journalistic term—lead paragraph. “Okay. Sorry.” She reached for the nail file and found that a tiny sharp point had emerged from inside the elevator. “Now we’ve got two things through.”

“More, more.”

Blythe was staring down at her comb. It was plastic with a thick, solid handle and long wide-spaced teeth, the kind called an Afro-comb, the only thing Blythe could get through her hair when she’d been out on a windy day. It might work. She grabbed it and began forcing it through the practically nonexistent opening. One tooth took hold. Dizzy with excitement, she pushed harder.

“Ouch.”

She stopped pushing. “What happened?”

“Something hit me in the nose. I crouched down here to see if any air was coming through the doors, and…”

“This is good news,” Blythe assured him. “It’s my comb. Try to grab it and help me get it through.” She instantly felt a tug.

“I’ve got a grip on it. If I can just bend it without breaking it…”

With a clatter, the nail file and the knife fell from the widening crack in the door through which two sets of long, strong-looking fingers were emerging.

“It’s opening!”

“Forget the comb. Help me push the doors.”

Blythe tucked the flashlight into her waistband. Moving closer for leverage, she put her fingertips through the opening and pushed with all her might. Her toe connected with something, the file or the knife, and kicked it through the space below the elevator car. For a moment she froze, listening as it fell down, down, endlessly down the elevator shaft to the basement thirteen floors below. She thought she might faint just waiting for it to hit bottom.

“Keep pushing.” He sounded desperate.

“We have a slight problem,” she said, willing her voice not to tremble. “You’re pretty far up from the floor, actually. If I keep pushing and the doors suddenly open, I’m going to fall down the elevator shaft. Not that anybody would miss me particularly, but I would hate the fall itself, if you know what I…”

“Stop pushing.” It was an order. “Let me think.” While he thought, a shoulder emerged through the opening above her. “Okay, you step back and pull on the left side—”

“My left or your left?” She was still poised in the middle, one hand on each side of the opening, prepared to die.

“Your left. And I’ll push the door to your right. Got it?”

She already had both hands gripped on one door, tugging. “Got it.”

“We’re almost there, almost there, don’t give up.”

With a terrifying suddenness, the doors popped open. Blythe fell backward. A suitcase landed on her left knee, followed by a body swinging a smaller bag. It felt like a huge body, a huge, trembling body. It covered her completely. Crisp hair brushed her face.

For a moment he just panted, then he said, “I think I love you. Will you marry me?”

Panic and all, she felt a smile rising to her face. “Let’s hold off on total commitment until morning, shall we?” she said.

“You’re right.” He puffed out the words, still not rolling away from her. “I was being impulsive. Names first. I’m Max. Max Laughton. And actually, I already have a date tonight. Have to meet my obligations first. Unless,” he added, sounding hopeful, Blythe thought, “she didn’t make it home.”

“What floor does your date live on?”

“Twenty-third. I just got into town and it’s a blind date, kind of a crazy situation…What’s wrong?”

The darkness, the fear, the tension, the relief had finally gotten to Blythe completely. She was shuddering beneath him, and gasped the words out between hysterical giggles.

“I’m your date,” she gurgled. “Hi. Welcome to New York.”

“YOU OKAY?” MAX ASKED the little person struggling along beside him when they’d reached the fifteenth-floor landing. “Want a rest? You must be worn out. Did you have to walk all the way home from the Telegraph?”

“Um-m,” was all she said, or moaned, from a spot that just about reached his shoulder. She wasn’t what he’d expected. From the sultry, purring voice on the phone that had asked him out for a night on the town as soon as he got to New York, he’d expected her to be more substantial, a blond bombshell, openly and deliberately provocative. Her voice had been full of heat and promise. When he’d quizzed Bart about her—Bart being a longtime friend of his parents and an uncle figure to him—all Bart had said was, “Candy Jacobsen? It’ll be quite a welcome.”

Max didn’t need any light to know that this woman was small, with fluffy hair that looked as if it might be red. She was sexy all right, but didn’t act as if she knew she was sexy.

Of course, people often presented a different picture of themselves on the phone. Whatever she was, she’d saved his life and that made her okay with him. More than okay. A person whose feet he’d like to kiss.

“Why…did you come…so early?” she panted.

“I was supposed to come as soon as I got to town.”

“Not…seven o’clock?”

“No.” He paused and aimed the flashlight at his watch. “Even if I misunderstood, it’s after eight now.”

“How time flies.”

It was merely a whisper. “Not in an elevator, it doesn’t,” he said, glancing down at the top of her head. They’d reached the seventeenth floor, and she already sounded completely winded. Her shoulders, narrow little shoulders in some kind of a T-shirt, were bent over as she focused on the lighted steps, probably counting them. She must be exhausted, had probably been exhausted the whole time she was rescuing him.

His heart swelled with compassion and something else—budding heroism. Yes, it was time for him to show the stuff he was made of. Time to be a macho man.

“You’re pooped,” he said by way of launching his plan.

“I’m fine,” she gasped.

“No, you’re not. Wait a second.” He shouldered his briefcase, grabbed her handbag over her squeak of protest and slung it over his other shoulder, then handed her his larger bag and swept her up into his arms.

“Save your strength,” she cried, and began to wriggle.

“You’re not helping,” he said. She might be little, but hanging on to, say, a hundred-pound wriggling tuna, who was dangling a thirty-pound suitcase way too close to the family jewels, had never been one of his life’s goals. “Besides,” he groaned, unable to help himself, “what am I saving it for?”

“Later?” she said and looked up at him, pointing the flashlight directly at their faces. She wore an oddly quizzical look. Maybe she had had “quite a welcome” planned for him. His body responded to this idea, but he told it to calm down. He needed the blood equally distributed through his veins to make it up the last six flights of stairs.

When he dumped her just inside the stairwell door so she could fumble through her handbag for the key, his knees were trembling in a way that was hardly heroic. He hoped she didn’t notice how he staggered behind her down the dark hallway to her door. He’d hoped that when she opened it, the last rays of sunlight would come flooding through her apartment windows, but the room was in shadows. Once he made it inside, he knew he was washed up.

“That was so sweet of you,” she was saying, “to carry me the rest of the way. I’m all rested, and you have to be dead on your feet. Sit down, for heaven’s sake. I have to get out the candles first, but then would you like a drink?” Her voice faded. Drawers opened and closed. “Water, definitely, but I imagine you could use something stronger. I sure could. We have a pretty good selection. What’s your pleasure?”

He’d made it to a sofa he’d spotted in her flashlight beam, where he collapsed facedown with the word, “Scotch,” on his lips. It might be the last word he ever uttered. How ignominious.

BEARING A LIGHTED CANDLE, Blythe crept toward the sofa. When he was in range of the light, she simply had to stare at him for a while, at his broad shoulders in a black polo shirt, a tapered back, a narrow waist and a butt to die for—firm, contoured and thoroughly male. His long legs were encased in black jeans, his thigh muscles bulging against the fabric.

His thighs. She was going all tight just thinking about them wrapped around her. This idea of Candy’s hadn’t been such a bad one after all.

“How do you like your Scotch?” It came out like a moan.

It took him a long time to answer, and when he did, his words sounded as if they were smothered by goose down, which, in fact, they were. “Rocks.”

Candle in hand, Blythe scurried to the freezer, automatically pressed a glass to the ice-maker button and remembered nothing was working. She stuck her hand in the storage bin and pulled out slick, already melting cubes.

She was going to make it all up to him. No more guilt. Even though this was Candy’s idea, not hers, he’d gone through hell to get to her and she’d make sure he wasn’t sorry. She already knew she wouldn’t be. Any man who’d carry her up six flights of stairs had to be as sensitive as Candy had promised.

Forgetful, maybe. She was sure Candy had said he was coming at seven o’clock, and for him to get stuck in the elevator, it meant he’d arrived around four o’clock. But then, Candy was often careless about details.

The important thing was that he was here. They’d have a drink together, she’d give him a chance to rest and come up refreshed, and then they’d see what course nature took.

Who was she kidding? One look at his back and she was ready to go at it like bunnies. For mental health reasons only, of course. When she got a look at his front, she might become uncontrollably aggressive about getting this therapy.

Blythe paused on her way out of the kitchen. If he wanted to. If he found her desirable. That was still the big if. Even a sensitive man had to feel something before he could—well, could.

She put the tray of drinks on the coffee table and sat down on the floor right beside his face, or where his face would be if he ever came up for air, moving the candle as close to that spot as she could without setting her eyelashes on fire.

She gulped her water and gazed at him. Gosh, he had a beautiful profile. His hair was the very dark brown of good chocolate, the seventy percent kind, and his skin was a warm tan. She’d have to wait to see the eyes under those long dark lashes. They were probably brown. She had a preference for blue eyes, but she wasn’t going to cross him off on the basis of one little failure to meet specifications.

The distinctive scent of the Scotch seemed to rouse him. His head rolled toward her until at last she got the full impact of his strong, regular features—his straight, narrow nose and a mouth with a full, curved lower lip. Blythe felt her tongue curl in anticipation, and at that moment, his closest eye opened and squinted against the candlelight.

Miracle of miracles, his eyes were blue, a deep, dark, magnificent blue. At least one of them was. In due course, Blythe was sure she’d get a glimpse of the other one.

The closest eyebrow quirked up. “After all we’ve been through,” he said, sounding less breathless, “why do you look so surprised to see me? I mean, you made an offer, and under the circumstances, I’m damned glad I accepted.”

With a snap, Blythe brought her lower lip up to meet her upper one. The way he put it wasn’t quite the way it had happened. Candy had made the offer, but why quibble over details? Dear Candy, wise beyond her years, had been right. It was time to get over Thor—no, Sven—and the man to get her over Sven was lying right here in front of her, much too tired to be sent back down the stairs. He was trapped. She’d caught herself a live one.

Odd that Candy had called him “attractive,” not “the sexiest man alive,” and that she hadn’t mentioned his luscious baritone voice, which was making Blythe’s spinal column vibrate. But now that she’d met him, she realized it didn’t matter what his voice sounded like. When you had a body like that, a voice like his was just frosting on the beefcake.

The real question was: How had Candy let this one get away? More than that, why was she simply handing him over to Blythe? Now that was what you called a good friend.

Blythe smiled and moved a little closer. “I wasn’t actually expecting you to show up,” she admitted, feeling like a cartoon character with stars on springs popping out of her eyes. “Most men would have stood a woman up in these circumstances. Of course, there weren’t any circumstances when you got here.”

“I still would have shown up. I’m always at the right place at the right time. Rain, snow, sleet, hail, just like the postman. It’s part of my job.”

“I’m glad to hear it. Dependability is crucial in your profession.” She’d heard that people fell apart when their shrinks went on vacation. She wondered if he saw patients on Saturdays and Sundays. Maybe he could come to New York on weekends, or she could go to Boston.

Whoa. She was getting way ahead of herself. It was more likely that this would be a one-night stand, or rather a single therapy session to help her get over the disastrous effect Sven had had on her.

Maybe this sort of therapy was his specialty, which he used on all his female patients. An unexpected, uncalled-for bolt of jealousy made her scalp prickle.

“Take a sip of Scotch,” she said encouragingly. Time was passing. Since he seemed to have difficulty moving his head, she added, “Want a straw?” She held the candle even closer to his face, hoping she didn’t look too much like a witch trying to intimidate an agent of Satan, because he didn’t look at all like an agent of Satan, nor did she have any desire to intimidate him. Seduce him? That was something else altogether.

“No.” Two perfectly matched dark blue eyes glared at her as he righted himself on the sofa and reached for the glass. He downed it in one desperate gulp. “That’s the first liquid I’ve had since noon,” he said.

Blythe dashed for the kitchen to refill the glass. “How terrible. Here. Drink some more.” She sat down beside him on the sofa and watched him closely as he drank.

He took one sip, and his glare faded into a warm, soft glow. “Much better,” he said, leaning against the cushions. “I’ll be back to normal in a minute.”

“Good,” Blythe said. “As soon as you’ve revived, let’s get right to it.”

“Excuse me?”

Her face heated up. “That is, if you want to now that you’ve met me.”

He sat up a little straighter. “Sure I want to. But I don’t think we can get right to anywhere right now.”

“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.”

He was a terrible liar, embarrassingly bad at it, but Blythe felt that was a point in his favor. He held out his hand to Garth. “I’m Max Laughton.”

“Garth?” Garth said in a tentative sort of voice. “Garth Brandon? Dr. Garth Brandon.” The title seemed to make him feel more secure.

Max shook Garth’s hand briefly, then turned to Candy. “You must be Candy. We had a date last night, and you’re late.” He gave her a totally engaging, disarming smile. Blythe would have died to be on the receiving end of that smile.

And was dying anyway, she was so touched to realize he was lying so unconvincingly in an attempt to save her reputation. A not-too-bright ape—and that would be according to ape standards—could have seen through him.

“Too late, apparently.” Candy’s chin firmed and her baby blue eyes flashed. “You slept together. I can see it written all over your faces. How could you, Blythe? You’re my best friend.”

In fact, a person could die from the sheer weight of the guilt Blythe felt on her shoulders.

“Let’s have coffee!” Garth said. He smiled at all of them. He had a nice smile, but it didn’t sock Blythe in the tummy the way Max’s did. “We can sit down, have a cup and talk things over.”

“There always were times, Garth,” Candy snapped, “when your perfect manners made me want to frigging barf.”

“Well, I’m sorry, Candy,” Garth said. “I feel used by the thing that has obviously occurred, but it makes me feel more in control to act like a civilized human. Besides, as a psychiatrist I’m always open to understanding the deeper motivations of people in times of stress, so I think…”

“I’m warning you, Garth. Stop being so frigging nice or I’m going to upchuck,” Candy said.

“Thank you for sharing your feelings,” Garth said, escaping to the kitchen. “Cream, sugar, anyone?”

“I’ll help,” Blythe said. “Oh, look, you lit the oven, too. There’s a coffee cake in the freezer. If I wrap it in foil, it will thaw in no time. And we have orange juice. Lots of sugar to jump-start the…”

“Listen to them,” Candy said. “They’re made for each other. And you had to come along and mess it up.”

Max, who didn’t want Blythe—that was her name, and it suited her—alone in the kitchen with this Garth person, was on his way to chaperone, but Candy’s voice brought him to a halt with one foot in midair.

He settled it down to the floor, slowly turned back to her, and for the first time took a good long look at Candy Jacobsen, with whom he’d thought he was spending the night.

She had to be six feet tall in those witch’s shoes she was wearing, and her blond hair, long and straight except where it curved at the ends, was thick and shiny.

Maybe a little too shiny. She wouldn’t have been able to shower and wash it this morning at the Telegraph offices. The gunk on her eyes was half-on, half-off. Well, not off. It was still on her face, just not in the right places. Those dark circles under her eyes weren’t exhaustion, they were eye makeup.

Who was he kidding? Cleaned up she’d be a stunner, a dream of a woman, just the kind of woman he was accustomed to dating, but more so. Then why did he keep glancing toward that kitchen door, hoping for another peek at the little red-haired, green-eyed Orphan Annie-type he’d—he’d—

It usually took him a few weeks to turn romance into a tangle that had to be straightened out. This time he’d done it before the first date.

“We can grill some toast,” Blythe was saying. “It’ll be good with the eggs.”

“This is turning into a full breakfast,” Garth answered her. “Maybe we should sit at the table.”

“That’s a good idea. I’ll set the table while you finish up in here.”

“No, no, I’ll do it. You pour the juice.”

Their happy voices were driving him crazy. “What exactly did I mess up?” he asked Candy, folding his arms across his chest and glaring at her.

“A perfect relationship,” Candy snapped. “Blythe needed somebody to have sex with, sure, but I knew she and Garth would have more in common than sex. And—” she moved a step closer, smiling sexily at his angry expression “—I knew you and I would make sparks together.” The smile faded. “And still will,” she said with a determination that made Max nervous. He was trying desperately to put the set of unrelated facts together, read some sense into what was going on here.

“Sorry, it just didn’t turn out that way,” he said, trying to look sorry. “It was the blackout that messed it up, not me. I was here by invitation, your invitation,” he reminded her, “but due to the circumstances, Blythe was the Good Samaritan who got me out of the elevator with her comb.”

It must have been his mention of the comb that made her blink, because her anger only escalated. “A frigging nameless Good Samaritan, apparently?”

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.