
The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
The Love Charm
Copyright ã 2004 Evelyn Starr
ISBN: 1-55410-100-X
Cover art and design by Martine Jardin
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher.
Published by eXtasy Books, a division of Zumaya Publications, 2004
Look for us online at:
www.zumayapublications.com
www.Extasybooks.com
Also By Evelyn Starr
Hot August Nights
Wild Blue
Made To Love Her
The Day After Summer
Sweet Little Lies
Dedication:
For the Secret Divas.
She'd barely stepped out of the Chinatown back alley with the 'love charm' in her possession, and there he was. The man. The very big, very dark, and exceedingly angry man.
She just thanked God he wasn't angry at her.
"Man, what the hell were you thinking?" he thundered, waving a massive and muscled arm in a way that suggested punches were about to be thrown. "You damn near ran me down. Didn't you ever hear of brakes?"
At first glance the cabbie, a slight man of some indeterminate middle-Eastern ancestry with an apparently limited command of the English language, appeared hopelessly outmatched. Until he reached into the front seat of his cab, way down under the dashboard, and pulled out a baseball bat, a long and sleek, gleaming aluminum deadly weapon.
Instantly, the big man took a step back.
JoJo froze where she was, trapped with nowhere to go...nowhere to escape. Blood rushed to her head and filled her ears, its ebb-pump, ebb-pump through her veins blotting out all other sound except the thwack-whack-whack of the cabbie bringing his bat down into the palm of his free hand over and over again.
The big man could easily snap the cabbie's neck if he wanted. He was that big. And he had a look in his eyes...a hint of some dangerous anger, barely suppressed. But the cabbie...
Blood was about to be shed, all right.
Real, serious blood. And JoJo wanted out of there. Stomach quaking, knees softening toward the consistency of water, in that instant she wanted out. And she remembered why she'd given up the dream of nursing school long before she'd been old enough to start.
Blood.
The sight of it, the heavy and metallic scent, did something to her. Left her weak. Sick. Terrified, as if some inexplicable, primeval and too-thinly-veneered part of her had risen too close to the surface and must be shoved back at any cost.
If her legs would only cooperate, she'd turn and run as hard and fast as she could, back into the alley. Back to where the ancient Chinese woman sat behind her lopsided folding table with her strange wares spread out in front of her. And once there, she would...what?
Did she really think one stooped and withered old woman was going to offer some sort of mystical, magical protection from what she knew was about to happen?
The cabbie advanced. Eyes murderous, he shouted something in his rich and lyrical, though absolutely unintelligible language. Something, JoJo felt certain, that wasn't meant to be and wasn't complimentary.
The big man stepped back again. Right onto JoJo's foot. Or...bulky beneath the civilized outer trappings of pressed khakis and blazing-white striped dress shirt, a veritable mountain of a man...he more accurately stepped onto JoJo.
She yelped and he whirled, the impending murder by baseball bat obviously forgotten as a look of startled surprise stamped itself across the broadest, single most handsome face JoJo had ever had the pleasure to see.
Their gazes met.
His eyes widened.
Her stomach did a long and slow drum-roll before it tightened itself into a hard and quivering knot.
Love charm. The memory of the old woman's whispery, watery voice insinuated itself into the back of her mind. Not for sale, lady. Meant for you. As gift. Work only for you. And with that she'd handed the object...a palm-sized slice of jade the shade of spring leaves shimmering in new sunlight, a small bit of iridescent-green heaven dangling from a looped length of dark-red velvet braid...to JoJo with a gnarled, insistent hand.
JoJo hadn't believed the piece of jade was really a magical love charm, of course. The idea was preposterous. But the well-worn and much-fingered bit of stone with its strange carvings the old woman claimed were so ancient they'd been forgotten with the passage of centuries had seemed somehow to belong to her. It had fit so perfectly into her hand...the perfect size, perfect shape, perfect color...that it couldn't belong to anyone else. Ever. And it had hummed, or had seemed to, anyway, in immediate response to her touch. Gently, but so insistently that JoJo realized she'd been hearing that murmur of sound inside her head for the longest time. From the instant she'd stepped up and out of the subway onto Canal Street, and maybe even longer. Gazing at the bit of jade, she'd been rapt, her mind filled with strangely wonderful, strangely delicious and indescribable vibrations like none she'd ever felt.
Vibrations like the ones she felt right now. Only these were stronger vibrations. Potent vibrations. So overpoweringly potent she would have ripped the thing from around her neck and flung it away into the gutter if only she'd had the strength to move. If only the air hadn't seemed to thicken around her somehow. Around the big man, around both of them. If only it hadn't grown so heavy and so ripe with some vague and disorienting promise that she could barely breathe. That all other life in the teeming street seemed to vanish with the blink of an eye and leave them alone. Completely and absolutely alone.
Tilting her head back, JoJo stared up at him. At five-ten, she'd always towered over everyone, the kids in her school, her clients at work, the other writers at the convention that had brought her to New York. Rarely had she been made to feel tiny by anyone. But this man was big. Maybe the biggest she'd ever seen. Standing a good six feet five, his entire body from the top of his thick, blue-highlighted jet-black hair to the soles of his immaculately-polished brown loafers was one incredibly trim, enormously fit, gorgeous bulk of muscle.
She gasped.
She knew she gasped. And in the same instant she felt the oval of jade flash against her skin. That was the only way she could describe the fluttering jolt of something vaguely hot, thoroughly disturbing yet undeniably arousing that sliced through her. It flashed. And began to hum again, so loudly she wondered why the big man didn't hear it. Why he didn't feel the peculiar vibration that seemed to want to brand the ancient pattern of its carvings right into her flesh.
Dimly, behind the humming, JoJo heard shouts. A fractured mix of English and Chinese, all mixed up with the unceasing flow of the cabbie's mellifluous language. The keepers of shops on either side of the alley rushed forward to turn the cabbie away. But she didn't move, and the big man didn't move.
His gaze never left hers.
"God in heaven," he said at last, sounding more like a small and very confused boy than a mountain of a man.
Against JoJo's chest, the oval emitted a final, short burst that felt almost like the sting of mild electrical shock. Then it went still. Went silent.
All of noisy and crowded Chinatown, all of noisy and crowded Manhattan, all of the noisy and crowded world, went absolutely and utterly silent.
When had the big man moved so close? So unbearably close she could smell the sweet, soft musk of his after-shave. So close that at any moment his chest would brush against hers. Or to be more accurate, his flat and taut stomach would brush her chest. When had he...
JoJo swallowed. Hard. Her nipples stood erect. Vaguely, she thought the big man must be able to see them through the thin silk of her blouse, but even more vaguely, she didn't care. "Exactly how t...tall are you?" she stammered because she couldn't think of anything else to say. Anything that might make a bit of sense to anyone who might hear. Including herself.
He didn't answer. He just continued to stare at her with darker-than-dark eyes that seemed to search for something deep inside hers...something he seemed to need and want more than any man should ever have to need or want anything.
There was a sadness about him. A remnant of something indescribable that sat like an invisible load on those broad and proudly-unbent shoulders. A pain, maybe, without a cure. A pain that nevertheless had to be cured. Had to be eliminated, if he was to survive. And JoJo wanted to be the one to eliminate it. Just like that, she thought, though there was no sensible basis for the notion she was the one person in the world who could eliminate it, or would.
She'd always suspected she had some single and overriding purpose for being alive. She'd always suspected that somewhere along the way, somewhere in her humdrum and less-than-exciting existence, that purpose had gotten lost or stalled. So, could this be it?
Could that look in the big man's eyes be the reason for her existence? Could...
"What's your name?" he asked after another long and mind-whirling pause, his voice as rich, as decadently, sinfully deep and irresistible as the finest chocolate whipped into the silkiest mousse.
"J...JoJo."
The faintest trace of a smile flickered in his eyes, though his face remained taut and stern, set in habitually unsmiling lines. "JoJo what?"
"H...Hammond. JoJo Hammond."
Incredibly, inexplicably, he'd taken both her hands in both of his. Just like the rest of him, his were enormous. Twice the size of hers, radiating ten times the strength. They were hands that could crush easily, maim without thinking, kill if he wanted to, and yet were gentle. Incredibly gentle, as he tugged a little at hers to pull her closer still until she felt the warmth of his body radiating into every fiber of hers. Into every sinew and every molecule of her being, And in that instant she realized she'd begun to want and need him...that she'd been waiting specifically for him, as much as his eyes and the hollow emptiness in his expression said he wanted, needed, and had been waiting for her.
"I d...don't know y...yours," she stammered, wishing she could get control of her voice before it began to squeak and squeal like the voice of a teenaged groupie in hot pursuit of her favorite rock star. "Y...your name, I m...mean."
"Miles," he replied, his gaze never wavering.
The world really had stopped turning.
Everything had stopped. And might never restart.
"Miles Ashton."
"I'm..." She'd stopped stammering. Mostly, she guessed, because she'd run out of things to say. At last she managed to convince her gaze to drift away from the jet-colored eyes that held her spellbound. Managed to convince it to move downward, barely downward, to his lips.
They were full and shapely, the lower one rounded and smooth, the upper indented just the right and perfect amount at the perfect spot. The corners tweaked upward just a little so that despite the infinite sadness he emanated from every pore, he wore the tiniest, most perpetually intriguing of smiles.
Kiss me.
The command couldn't have been more unmistakable if she'd climbed up on top of the nearest subway kiosk and shouted it for everyone to hear. But Miles seemed unaware of it.
Puzzled, JoJo lifted her gaze to his again.
He frowned slightly. "Did the oddest thing just happen?" he asked in a tone of real confusion, making no effort to release her hands or move away from her.
"I..."
The love charm gave a slight and shimmering quiver.
Love charm. That was the old woman again, the ancient vendor in the alley, speaking up inside JoJo's head. Very old. Who knows how old? Charm made for just the right one. Just for you. Gift for you, lady. Jade to wear against skin, jade for over heart. Made to bring love.
JoJo had tried to protest. Had tried to offer payment. Except for the loop of braid, the thing really had looked old. Older than old. Like an antiquity, maybe. Not like something that should be given away in the depths of a dingy and black-shadowed alleyway by an old, old woman who'd seemed to cower as if she feared the sun. Not like something that should be found in an alleyway at all.
But the old woman had insisted. Only for you, she'd kept repeating over and over again, her gnarled hand thrusting the tempting green tidbit out, refusing to accept JoJo's refusals.
And JoJo had wanted it. Damn her hide, from the instant she'd seen it, she'd wanted that piece of green stone more than she'd wanted anything in her life. Her soul had done everything but cry out audibly, demanding she touch it, hold it. And once she had...
Once she'd touched the charm, she'd been lost to the magic of it. So she'd slipped the cheap loop of red braid over her neck and dropped the spring-green oval inside her blouse as the old woman instructed. Made for skin, not sun, the old woman had insisted. Only skin make magic work. Only your skin.
"You what?" Lost in her confusion, JoJo had forgotten about Miles. But now his voice, trembling with something that wasn't laughter, dragged her back to reality. To the here and now in which his voice seemed to have taken on the same reverberation, the same slight quiver, as the stone between JoJo's breasts. It seemed to quiver in time with the stone.
"I what?" she echoed, dazed.
He frowned. "You started to say something."
"I did?"
"You did." His hands tightened around hers. "But then you..." His gaze still hadn't wandered from hers, and for a moment she had the craziest notion that for him, all other women had ceased to exist. That she was the only one, the last one, left in the world and the only one, the last one, he would ever want.
Of course that was as preposterous as any of the other things that had happened in the five minutes...or had it been ten?...since she'd stepped out of the subway.
"I asked you if the oddest thing hadn't just happened," he repeated, enunciating carefully as if he thought she might be hard of hearing. "You said 'I', and then you didn't say anything else. Your eyes sort of...glazed over. And you got the strangest look on your face. You didn't finish what you started to say."
"I don't know what I was going to say." The eye contact remained unbroken. Unbreakable. "That I'm sorry I got in your way? It's just that the old woman..." She made a sort of half-gesture toward the alley at her back. "She shook me up, with all her love charms, and..." Dear God, had she said that out loud?
Miles frowned a little, and she felt herself starting to blush as bright-red as her blouse. "Did something odd just happen?" he asked again.
"I would say..." JoJo swallowed again. She licked her lips and fought back a tremor of something that wasn't a shiver. Definitely not a shiver, but more like a...a..."Yes. I definitely think something odd happened."
"And what are we supposed to do about it?"
We?
Dear God. Dear, sweet Jesus and all the saints in heaven. JoJo's legs had gone numb. Weak. Her stomach had started to leap up and down, as excited as a kid on the first day of the circus. And between her legs...oh, God, she wished she could look back into the alley. Wished she could run back and check it out with the old woman. Because this couldn't be happening. This wasn't happening, even if the woman had insisted the 'love charm' was guaranteed to work.
Too bad she hadn't said a word about what in blazes JoJo was supposed to do once it did work.
It was too bad JoJo hadn't asked. But then, there was no such thing as a love charm. So why would she ever have asked in the first place?
"I..." There she went again.
"There you go again." Miles echoed as if he'd read her thoughts, and this time he did smile. His lips smiled, his face smiled, even his eyes smiled.
JoJo's heard began to bang in the strangest way. And the oval of carved jade had fallen silent. It had no advice to offer. But biology did.
Biology was screaming at her, telling her she knew damned well what she was supposed to do next. What she shouldn't do next with some stranger she'd just picked up off the street, but was probably going to do anyway since she seemed to have completely lost her mind.
"Tea?" Miles asked.
"Wh...what?" Along with her inhibitions and her good judgment, the old woman's charm seemed also to have wiped away every trace of intelligence she'd ever possessed.
"There's a tea house over there." His gaze never releasing its hold upon hers, he tilted his head to the side slightly, in the direction of the next cross street. JoJo saw his Adam's apple jerk a little, almost spastically, as he swallowed as hard as she'd swallowed seconds before. "You really look like you need to sit down. And I thought...maybe we could get some tea? Maybe a sweet bun, and..."
"Sounds good."
And exactly what the devil was she thinking sounded good? The tea?
Mentally, JoJo shook her head.
The sweet bun?
No, again.
The 'and'?
Bingo! That was it! A winner!
But she, he, they, didn't move. Not a muscle. Not a hair.
They simply stood rooted to the spot, hands clenched around hands, fingers interlaced inextricably with fingers, eyes locked in that gaze that led each of them deep, deep, deep into the other as life and sound and all of Chinatown...all of New York City...swirled around them in one meaningless, unimportant and scarcely noticed blur.
What the hell had happened back there?
Miles couldn't figure it out. Somehow he'd transitioned from impending hand-to-hand combat to a state of dazed fascination so fast that his body hadn't stood a chance of keeping up. And his brain...shit, his brain was even farther behind than his body, and it didn't look like either of them was going to catch up any time soon. His heart had been pounding, too. Ever since he'd heard a woman's voice shriek in pain and fear, and had spun around to look straight into the most curiously arresting pair of ordinary brown eyes he'd ever seen.
Ordinary?
Shit.
Still clutching JoJo Hammond's hand as if she was someone he'd never be able to live without, as if he thought she'd try to run away if he let go even for a second, he decided her eyes were about as far from ordinary as any he'd ever seen. Though they might have seemed plain brown at first, wide and innocent and guileless, he'd only started to realize there was something about them. Some golden, magical glow deep down in the farthest recesses of them that made it impossible to turn away then, or any time since.
God in heaven, his heart was pounding like it wanted to explode right out of his chest. For a minute he thought he might be having a heart attack. His grandfather had died of one, at the ripe old age of fifty-three. His father had had two before his sixtieth birthday, though thank God they hadn't been fatal. The old man had ended up dying much later, a quiet and peaceful death in his sleep, a victim of fast-moving pneumonia that had knocked him out before he ever knew what hit him. But pneumonia or no pneumonia, heart attacks did run in the family, and he...
But how could it be a heart attack, anyway? He hadn't died of one that horrible morning when...but he wasn't going to go there. Not now, and not ever again.
He couldn't be having a heart attack. He'd always taken good care of himself. He made it a point to eat right...most of the time, anyway. He exercised, watched his cholesterol, did every last little thing the doctor told him to do if he wanted to live to a ripe and healthy old age.
So if it wasn't a heart attack, how the hell was he supposed to explain the strange and dizzying tightness that seemed to have claimed not only his chest, but his arms, his back and his gut as well? What else would explain the way he seemed barely able to breathe, and then only with enormous difficulty? Why each release of expended air and each influx of the new, pungently perfumed with smells of cooking drifting out through the open door of the restaurant they'd just passed, had to literally fight its way into and out of his lungs?
And what in the living hell was that ringing inside his head? The one that drowned out even the din of midday traffic in Manhattan?
Oh, it was a heart attack, all right. Or maybe a stroke. Damn, a stroke would explain all of it...all the weirdness, the noises, the...
Somehow, he managed to lift one hand and press the palm of it flat against the center of his chest, half-expecting to feel something there. To feel his heart working itself steadily, unstoppably, toward the explosion that was sure to drop him in his tracks any second now, stone-cold dead at JoJo Hammond's one-hundred per cent gorgeous feet. But he felt nothing ominously out of the ordinary. No insane jerking, no wild pounding, not even an ominous thumping.
Everything in the old ticker department appeared to be humming along perfectly well. As well as ever. And that was strange. That was really, really...
"...going?"
JoJo had been saying something. She was looking at him with the most bizarre I'm-not-feeling-too-good-either-but-do-that-again-and-I'll-run kind of look.
"I..." Miles forced a smile to his face and hoped it didn't look half as crooked and twitchy as it felt. Even if he could tell by the responding look on JoJo's face that it did.
"Are you okay?" she asked.
"Fine." He worked at making the smile a little more natural. "I just had my mind on something else." Yeah. On the fact that something's going to kill me any second now, and I haven't got a clue what the hell it is.
"...about tea."
Oh, for Christ's sake. She'd said something else, and he'd missed that, too. In another second she was going to think he was some kind of mindless buffoon. If she didn't think it already.
She was going to dump him like a hot potato. And in that instant he knew, without a doubt or a hesitation, that if she did he really was going to die. Because he, Miles Ashton, who'd sworn off relationships forever after Shirl had been so violently, so inexplicably and unexpectedly ripped straight out of his life and his heart, couldn't live without this brown-haired woman with the gold-shot eyes that were anything but plain.
Miles shuddered. He wished, as he had so many times over the past year or two, he could go back. Only this time, for the first time in a long time, he wasn't wishing to go all the way back to before. This time he'd be happy enough to go back just fifteen minutes. Just to a time when he'd been getting himself halfway pulled together again. To a time when he hadn't had to think too hard about anything he didn't want to think about.
Except maybe, on the all too frequent occasions when he hadn't been able to stop himself, about Shirl.
She wasn't something he thought about often any more. Wasn't something he allowed himself to think about. But now he'd done it twice, in just about as many minutes. And then, in a way it never had before, his cock reacted to the thought of her and the memory of her, of lovely and laughing Shirl in the pale-green suit she'd been wearing the last time he saw her. The brand-new one that had snuggled itself so perfectly around her body and brought out the best, the deepest-green highlights in her eyes.
It shrank.
Dear Jesus in heaven. Walking along Mott Street, in full view of at least a thousand people, he actually looked down at the crotch of his khakis.
A minute ago, caught up in the weird energy that radiated from this woman...this JoJo person...he'd been sporting a bulge that said more clearly than any billboard ever could that he was taking notice, he was equipped, he was ready.
Then he'd thought about Shirl. He'd seen her face with his mind's eye. A little indistinctly, maybe, now that time had begun to soften the edges. But he'd thought of her, all right. He'd thought about her, realized he'd shoved her so far to the back of his mind that he'd almost forgotten how much he'd loved her. Loved her, dammit, as much as it was possible for any man to ever love any woman! He'd loved her and yet he'd been hard enough and callous enough to put her away in a place where he'd never have to think about her again.
That angered him. It disgusted him. Made him feel guilty, the way he'd felt guilty almost every day that she'd been gone. Guilty that he'd kept himself alive but let her go. That he hadn't done one good goddamn thing to even try to save her.
He'd tried to put Shirl out of his mind as if she'd never existed, and that was why he'd gone from full-blown erection to limp as a pancake.
Survivor's guilt. That was what the shrink up in Connecticut had called it. The one he'd gone to when the screaming and the nightmares got so bad the neighbors had finally complained to the police. Survivor's guilt, post-traumatic stress disorder, and...
"...the hell is it with you?" JoJo sounded impatient. More than impatient. She sounded annoyed, aggravated, frustrated.
Miles looked at her again and knew this had to be the end. His heart gave a lurch. One enormous, gigantic, killing lurch as his cock roared back to life.
Completely, instantly back to life.
Open-mouthed, dumbfounded, he stared at JoJo.
"You said you wanted to get some tea," she said. "But if you ask me, you look like you need something a hell of a lot stronger than tea."
"Tea will be..." His voice broke like a thirteen-year-old's, and he had to stop to clear his throat and get it back in working order. "Tea will be fine." Although a scotch and soda...
Too bad he wasn't a hard-drinking man. That was just one more thing the doctor said wasn't good for the ticker. But Christ in a Cadillac, he'd be willing to make an exception in this case. He'd be willing to make a dozen exceptions. Because something truly had gone wrong with him, and he thought the only way he was going to escape it was to find himself some quality time right at the bottom of the biggest bottle of Johnny Walker Red he could get his hands on.
Thankfully, JoJo seemed unaware of his theoretical descent into alcoholism or of the incredibly painful and thrumming hard-on that had seized him in a way no hard-on ever had before. She'd turned away from him, one hand outstretched to shove open the smudged glass door of the tea room he'd suggested. And he simply followed after her, going where the enormous, swollen creature between his legs commanded him to go.
His cock was pointing straight at her ass. Aching for it so violently he had no choice but to notice for the first time that the woman he'd at first thought a little too plain and unremarkable for his taste had the nicest ass he'd ever seen. Her tight little scrap of pink-printed skirt with the hem that dropped almost to her knee on one side but stopped short just below her hip on the other molded itself around every curve of her. Molded itself tight and smooth, showing off to perfection the rounded, smooth sway of the hips that beckoned him on, into the tea room, enticing him so badly that it was all he could do to keep from swinging his own hips back and forth in a fool's attempt to match her rhythm. Because his cock was now insisting he would match her rhythm.
One way, or another.
Finding a table, a scarred, battered square of wood-grained Formica tucked into a corner as far from the window as it could get, she bent her lovely, lovely long legs and deposited her sweet, tight ass onto one of the molded red-plastic chairs. And that was a shame. A damned, criminal crying shame.
He'd just been starting to enjoy that ass.
JoJo stared at him with her flashing, flaming, fantastic eyes, inviting him to join her.
Somehow, he did. Somehow he managed to convince his own legs to fold and avoid snapping his girder-stiff rod in half when he collapsed, much less gracefully, into the other chair.
A waitress had appeared as if from thin air. She stood beside JoJo, and both of them were staring at him with vague expressions of confusion and mounting alarm.
Shit. He had no time for alarm now. No time for confusion.
All he had time for were JoJo's lips. Sweet lips. Full, strawberry-pink lips that could outpace any damned sweet bun for the ultimate in delight any time, any way. He saw her lips moving. Saw her glance up at the waitress and knew she was ordering. Knew he couldn't care less what she ordered, unless it was a ready-made bed for two.
He had to pull himself together. He wished to Christ he knew how.
"So." JoJo turned her gaze back to him, and he shivered all the way down to his soul.
Something was happening inside his balls. Something he'd thought was never going to happen again. Warmth. Desire. A sudden need to tumble straight into the sack with the prettiest...yes, she was the prettiest, was the most downright, goddamn gorgeous...woman he'd ever seen simply because she was here, and...shit. JoJo Hammond scared the living, freaking hell right out of him. That was it...had to be it. She scared him because she made him need her. Made him want to have her for ever and ever, when that was so far out of keeping with everything he'd promised himself, everything he'd vowed to Shirl's memory and everything he'd been determined to deny himself that he decided right then and there that he really had gone for the big time.
He really had given himself a stroke.
"Are you all right?" JoJo and the waitress were frowning again. JoJo had leaned forward a little, across the table. Her bright-red blouse clung, silken and shimmering, around each and every curve of her breasts. Perfect, thrusting breasts that even a eunuch...catching the waitress's glance, he tried to sit up straight again. Tried to close his mouth, because she'd stopped dead in the act of placing a plate of sweet buns and a pot of tea on their table.
"I'm fine," he murmured, and with the most manful effort he'd made in his life, managed to smile at JoJo. This time, thank God, he didn't have to work so hard to make it feel like it at least resembled something natural. "Must have been the sun."
Jojo's forehead wrinkled in a way that made him want to toss the table aside and grab her. Made him want to kiss her, and see if those full, slightly pouty lips tasted as strawberry-pie sweet as they looked.
"Sun's pretty strong out there," he said, breathing a silent prayer of thanks for the deep, smooth flow of his voice that revealed nothing of what was going on inside.
"I guess." She just kept frowning. Kept looking at him. Kept sitting there with both hands wrapped around the small green porcelain cup she'd raised almost to her strawberry-delicious mouth. But she wasn't drinking. She was only swirling. Swirling and swirling, moving the tea around in her cup exactly the way he'd like to swirl himself around and around inside her. "I have to say, I don't feel quite...steady...myself."
This was destiny. Had to be. The not-entirely-welcome news broke over him with a shock. He wasn't ready for destiny, but it sure as hell seemed to be ready for him...seemed to be past ready. Something in the air, or maybe in the sunshine that poured down from that astoundingly blue and cloudless sky into the street outside, had started to shout at him. Had ordered him to sit up and take notice, because it...destiny, or fate, or whatever the hell else he wanted to call it...had come to a decision.
He was to be with JoJo. He'd been summoned to Chinatown today so that he could be with her, and that was that. Period. End of story.
"Shit." He said it before he thought about it.
JoJo's eyes widened, and her expression changed to one of surprise. Or maybe of shock.
Grabbing his own cup, Miles gulped the pale-amber tea down, leaves and all, once again wishing it was something a hell of a lot stronger.
"You know," she said slowly. "I don't want to be here any more than you do."
Miles glared at her. What the devil was that supposed to mean, anyway? He waited while the waitress, who'd apparently decided to hover near their table in case he went suddenly and uncontrollably berserk and started trashing the place, poured more tea. Then, picking up the cup, he gulped it down again, barely noticing that it was hot or that it burned his tongue and the roof of his mouth.
"I don't understand this," JoJo went on. "No more than you do. I don't know you, for God's sake, so I don't know what I'm doing...I don't make it a habit to just pick up strange men in the street."
"I never said you did."
And that seemed to be that. She didn't say anything else. She just kept staring. With eyes so incredibly beautiful, so fantastic that his cock kicked again. Harder. So hard it was all he could do to not grab it and try to massage it back into submission.
"My name is Miles Ashton," he declared after a while, as if that explained everything. As if that made it perfectly all right for her to have just scooped him up and carted him away on some kind of strange and whirling cloud of...
Or had he scooped her?
Hell. His hand twitched when his cock did, wanting to reach down and adjust. To caress, and fondle, and find...please God...a little relief.
He didn't have a clue about anything. Except that she was gorgeous.
"You told me that before." Putting her teacup down, she folded her hands together and leaned her chin on them. She smiled. Her sweeter-than-sweet mouth curved up at the corners, a dimple appeared in one soft-and-smooth cheek, and her strawberry-lips parted a little. Just enough to drive him insane all over again with the need to kiss her. "Tell me something I don't know."
"What would you like to know?" Brilliant. He wished he could kick himself. He might have tried, if his legs hadn't gone so weak. If all their substance hadn't been diverted into the shamelessly-rearing monster between them, so that he couldn't have moved them if he'd been inclined to try.
"Tell me who you are. Besides Miles Ashton, I mean. Tell me what you're doing in Chinatown on a Tuesday afternoon when everybody else in the city is working. Tell me why that cabbie wanted to kill you."
He made an effort. He relaxed. A little. "The last one's easy. The damned fool tried to run me down when I was crossing the street. I took exception to his God-given right to own the whole damned place. And he took exception to my exception. It's only...you're not from New York, are you?"
Her smile melted away. Turned into a small and slightly defensive frown. "And just how do you know that?"
"If you were, you'd know that a cabbie trying to kill an innocent pedestrian is just a normal day in Paradise."
"And the rest?" Obviously unaware of the war that had started up inside him...grab her and kiss her, maybe even toss her to the floor and have his way with her? Or don't grab, don't kiss, don't have anything...? JoJo smiled again.
"The rest."
"What do you do?"
"I'm...uh..." Now, how the hell was he supposed to answer that? How the hell was he supposed to tell this woman he'd just met, the most gorgeous one he'd ever met who'd apparently been dropped straight down out of a clear blue sky and tossed literally right under his feet when he hadn't been looking, that he didn't do anything? That he was a living mess who wasn't capable of doing anything? How on God's green earth was he supposed to look her straight in the eye and say 'I have a dead fiancé and the firm I worked for just up and disappeared in a cloud of smoke one fine day, and now I feel guilty that I'm alive?' How was he supposed to tell her he felt so guilty that'd he'd talked himself into all kinds of syndromes...half a dozen of them, whose names he couldn't even pronounce?
How the hell was he supposed to tell her any of that and not expect her to run for her life?
If there was one thing in the world Miles certain as hell understood, it was running for your life. He'd been there. Done it. And he wouldn't blame JoJo Hammond one good little goddamned bit if she leaped up from the table this instant and did it for herself. Just barreled into the street, arms flailing, screaming that she'd just confronted something ugly. So ugly that it...
"Well?" Her eyebrows went up. She was waiting. So he had to say something. "That was a pretty simple question, Miles. What do you do for a living?"
"I used to do a little investment counseling," he hedged carefully, about to enter a minefield and determined at all costs...at whatever cost...to avoid it.
"Investments? On Wall Street, you mean?"
"Close by."
"And now?" God, she wasn't going to let it go, was she? "That's what you used to do. But what about now? What do you do now?"
"What do you do?"
She scowled. "I asked you first."
He sighed. Bit back a groan. Fiddled with his tea cup, took a bite of sweet bun that wasn't really all that sweet, swallowed it and fiddled with his cup again. "Not much," he admitted finally. "I've had some...issues. I had to drop out for a while, and I've spent a lot of time in Connecticut the past couple of years."
Her eyebrows went up even more. "Connecticut? I've never been there. I hear it's beautiful."
"It is." He looked out the window at the street.
Because he was afraid she might read the truth in his eyes?
"Do you have a house there, or..."
"It was my Dad's place. It's where I grew up, and...look, I don't know what's happened here. Why you...we..."
Biting down on her lip with a force he could almost feel in his own lips and could most certainly taste, she stared into her cup and colored the same bright, unabashed pink as her little off-kilter skirt. "And you think I do?"
"JoJo." Reaching out across the small square of their table, Miles caught her chin in his hand and lifted it.
She blushed again. Turned downright red this time. "What?"
"I don't understand this. It's not like I...I mean, I never expected..."
Goddamn it, anyway. How the hell was he going to explain what he was feeling? How he felt, without going into all that other stuff?
How the hell could he tell her he wanted her...wanted every fiber of her body and her soul, wanted to take her to bed and do things to her in ways he'd never, ever done them before, when he didn't deserve to have her?
How in the hell was he going to tell her, and more importantly, how in the hell was he going to get himself out of this?
Thankfully, he didn't have to. "I know," she murmured. "I didn't expect anything like this, either. I feel like...I don't know...like I've been struck by lightning. I don't know how else to explain it."
So. She felt the same way he did.
That wasn't good. Not good at all.
Biting back a groan, he grabbed her hand so suddenly it startled the ever-loving crap out of him and dragged her to her feet. He groped in his pocket, dropped a twenty onto the table and without a word, without so much as a second's thought, pulled her toward the door.
"Where are we going?"
"Christ on a cruise ship, I don't know. I can't think straight, woman. I can't even..."
"But the sweet buns!" Reaching back at the last possible instant, she scooped one off the plate. "We've barely..."
"All I know," he growled, dragging her into the street. "Is that we can't stay here."
He'd said it was too far to his apartment in mid-town. Once she told him about her hotel and the convention of romance novelists...almost six thousand of them...that had brought her to New York in the first place, he'd said the hotel was even farther. And anyway, he didn't think he was ready to handle hordes of shrieking women dressed in pink.
She hadn't corrected him. Hadn't told him that some of those novelists were men, and that even if some of the women did on occasion shriek with joy or rage, very few of them made a habit of wearing pink. She just stayed silent, lost in some sort of trance-world in which it had become perfectly natural and perfectly acceptable to bump into strangers in the street and immediately accompany them to hotels. To rose-colored rooms overlooking tiny, green-shaded courtyards filled with the long and slanted rays of late-afternoon sun.
Perfectly natural. Perfectly acceptable.
Miles faced her across the width of the room. His face, highlighted with glowing color that radiated upward from places where that beautiful afternoon light brushed rose-colored carpeting, looked even more mystified now than it had a few minutes ago, downstairs, when he'd booked the room. His expression said he still didn't understand what had happened to him, or how he'd come to be here. Might never understand.
And that was perfectly natural and perfectly acceptable, because JoJo barely understood that part of it herself.
The shell-shocked look passed from his face suddenly, replaced by another that she couldn't read...or maybe she didn't want to read it. It was a look of even greater confusion, of desire, and hope, and fear, touched with the faint and underlying fury she'd sensed in everything he did, every word he said. Striding forward, he caught her upper arms with hands so large the fingers wrapped easily around their thickest part, just above her elbows. He caught her and he held her, not quite at arm's length but not pulled up close against him, either. Staring down at her for the longest of moments, his jet-dark eyes turned piercing, as if he'd made up his mind to find some kind of answer hidden in the depths of hers.
Trembling a little, but not from fear...not exactly...JoJo lifted her head and met that questioning gaze without flinching or trying to turn away.
At second thought, he was probably not the best-looking man she'd ever seen. But he sure as heck came close. Bigger than ever at such close range, his jet-dark hair thick and wavy and his deep-brown, not-quite-black eyes smoldering in finely-molded sockets, he was an intense-looking man. A thoroughly vital one, who exuded some sort of strange and potent virility she couldn't name but that she could feel shimmering from the hands that held her and the eyes that questioned her. It was an aura that excited. One that taunted and dazzled, starting a soft effervescence of moisture in the deepest places between her legs. Hypnotic in its intensity, riveting in its sharpness, frightening in its directness, the power he exuded set the pendant around her neck to humming again. Not softly now, but insistently. So insistently it seemed to fill her completely, in ways she'd never been filled with a sound, and never known she could be filled, right dddown to the soles of her feet.
"So," he murmured after a long, long while, his confusion evident once again in the look upon his face. "Here we are."
"Here we are," she agreed, fighting to suppress a new shiver as the pendant's soft purring combined with the heat of his gaze to raise goose-bumps on her flesh and make her nipples stand out taut and hard against the silk of her blouse.
Could he see them? Could he know...
Of course he could. But he only stood there motionless, close to her but not close, his expression confused but not confused, staring down at her with dark eyes that said he knew he was lost. Knew he'd passed the moment of his final chance, the last possible instant at which he could hope to extricate himself from what had only been inevitable from the start. Eyes that said he knew he'd already connected with her, so deeply and irrevocably that there was no longer any hope for escape.
And the fact that JoJo barely knew him? Knew nothing about him other than his name?
Her shiver turned into a shudder, a deep-seated murmur of soul-felt longing mixed with the sense that something exciting was about to happen at last. Something was about to snap irreparably the threads of humdrum that had bound her to her old life back home in Erie. And the idea that she knew next to nothing about him only served to make the moment more delicious and the anticipation of what he was about to do to her and she was about to do to him more delightful.
Understandable or not, sensible or not, some kind of mysterious bond had been forged between them. More than she'd shared with any of the men who'd flitted briefly in and out of her life, making no marks and leaving no impressions. The possibility of escape was impossible, as it had been right from the start.
She wanted him, and that was the only thing that could be allowed to matter right now. She wanted him with all the yearning of a need that hurt and terrified and bewildered. But how could she make him see? How could she make him know? How could she share in that wanting until the desire for her consumed him in the same way her desire for him was consuming her?
"I..." Miles swallowed hard. His fingers tightened convulsively in the split second before they released her arms and reached for the collar of her blouse, his hands so tremulous and fragile-appearing despite their size that they might have been a pair of newborn leaves caught up in the violence of a murderous storm. "Before God," he said quietly, "I don't know what...how..."
For a second JoJo thought he meant only to straighten her collar. And for a second that was exactly what he did before dropping his hands very naturally, slipping them along the silken smoothness of her blouse until his no-longer-hesitant and not-at-all-clumsy fingers closed around her breasts.
Slowly, slowly, he brushed his thumbs across the tightened points of her nipples, the thin layer of silk seeming to heighten the sensation rather than dim it. His gaze still locked to hers and boring into her with that odd inquisitiveness that chilled at the same time it warmed her to the very marrow. He stroked slowly. Oh, so slowly. With a caress that at first ignited a small and steady flame deep inside her and then, with each succeeding touch, fanned it to a fluttering and searing-bright brilliance that filled her heart, and the room, and all the air around them.
Gasping, JoJo held her breath. She never allowed her gaze to stray from the dark eyes that held hers, demanding answers she knew she'd never be able to give because there were no answers. Only more questions. So many questions. So many causes for wonder, and delight, and curiosity.
Questions like...would the rest of him, all of him, be as large as the hands that touched her, marveling at the shape and the size of her breasts? Would he...
Without warning he tilted his head and brushed his mouth against hers.
It was only the slightest touch of sunlight-flavored flesh, a burning caprice of a touch that barely made contact, just as the touch of his hands had scarcely imprinted itself upon her breasts. But it was enough to awaken. Enough to set off a sweet explosion inside her, of moisture and eagerness accompanied by another wave of longing so charged she thought it must fuse her to him forever, flesh joined inextricably at lips and mouth, joined for all eternity at every point at which their skin made contact.
It was a kiss, and not a kiss. It was enough to chase away any last lingering of worry, any remaining shred of doubt that this could be right. That this could be meant to be, and always had been.
The next time Miles kissed her, almost immediately, he stroked the tip of his tongue across her lips, a swift and scalding suggestion of a touch that sent an even stronger, an even more inarguable drift of that sense of rightness down, into even the most hesitant, most secret and guarded parts of her.
Right. Meant to be.
"Miles?" JoJo's voice was not her own. It was too breathless, too low and incandescent with quaking need to be her own. "Will you..." Another gasp cut off her words unspoken as his hands had begun to move. Slowly at first, they left her breasts to explore the front of her blouse that clung persistently, a thin silk barrier impeding his progress. To find the row of tiny pearl buttons and work with exquisite precision and agonizing care as they took on each shimmering bit of opalescence in its turn. Finally, after what seemed a spellbound lifetime, the blouse opened. Her breasts lay exposed to rose-reflected sunlight, the cooling rush of air, and the disbelieving wonder that filled Miles's face.
"Jo." He breathed her name softly, lifting a hand to trace a single finger around the aching point of her nipple. With each dizzying, dazzling circle, the pendant between her breasts reached a momentary crescendo...a peak in its shimmery vibrato that murmured she was moving closer to something important. Something strong enough to shatter her entire world and then remake it. Something stupendous, the likes of which had never happened before and would never, ever happen again. The moment she'd been born to live. The one moment...
If she was to believe a piece of jade. If she was to truly and unquestioningly believe what common sense said shouldn't be believed. What her heart told her...
Her heart. Could Miles feel it beating beneath the suddenly-inflamed flesh he teased with that fingertip? Could he feel it pounding and jerking, and did he know that she was never going to be able to survive without him?
Exploring fingers smoothed her breasts' rounded upper surfaces. Leaving the rising buds of her nipples anguished and bereft for the fraction of a second they departed, his hands returned again almost immediately to resume their brushing with quick and determined strokes that left trails of sparking, sizzling stars in their wake.
All that, with barely a touch? JoJo felt a quivering again, deep inside. And what the devil was going to happen if the touch became more intimate? If, as only seemed likely, Miles's flesh met hers and entered? When they were no longer separate and distinct individuals, but had been joined into one?
What then?
Her knees weakened. Her resolve, too. A long, slow whisper of a sigh escaped her parted lips and the sweet, internal trembling grew stronger as her body moistened itself in earnest.
Large hands slipped the blouse from her shoulders, a silken breath whispering across sensitized skin. They sent it floating to the floor, a drift of flame that settled in a gentle and languid haze around her feet.
His body was so close now. So close that the touch of his thighs burned against her, the hard and swollen ridge between them intoxicating. Alluring.
The love charm lay exposed now, softly-green, its dark red ribbon the perfect length to suspend it between her breasts and directly above her heart, just as the old woman had said it should. Its strange and lost-to-antiquity carvings seemed to take on a new clarity that she could feel. No longer worn or too-often handled, they felt fresh-hewn, their edges firm and heavy. Their cutting edges seemed to transfer the long-forgotten symbols and designs to her skin, branding her not with heat, but with that faint, all-but-indistinguishable murmur only she seemed able to hear. Branding her for all time. But she knew that if she looked, she would see no mark. No hint at all of what had been done to her. And Miles? What about him?
What had the love charm done to him?
He seemed mesmerized, oblivious to the recurring shock waves that all but shook the room. Crying out with a low sound deep in the back of his throat, the sound of something barely awakened and primeval, he simply swept her into an embrace that tightened, then tightened again as the hardness between his legs grew harder and larger. So incredibly much larger. Arms shaking, his entire body tremulous with some unsettling and nameless ague that transmitted itself from his body to hers with a jagged, almost electrical chill, he jerked against her.
In that instant the love charm began to vibrate again.
No longer a soft humming that seemed more an echo of her own blood rushing through her veins than any real sound, the palm-sized oval of jade pulsed. So strongly and so insistently it seemed to literally leap away from her skin with every surging throb of timeless energy gone wild, a heart swept beyond control, a mind on the verge of total and irreparable chaos.
Miles's mouth found hers once more, and this time she parted her lips. She invited him to draw her directly into him. Back arching, breasts thrusting forward to exult in the smooth fabric of his dress shirt pressing their parched and needful tips, JoJo returned a kiss that only grew deeper when she responded. Deeper, and more demanding with every searing stroke, his tongue sought the warmth of hers. It subtracted from it and then added to it, joining in the rhythms she initiated and then initiated new and never-before-imagined rhythms of his own. Enticing, alluring rhythms that invited her to plumb the most secret and forbidden limits of him, just as he was plumbing hers. To seek out, one by one, every hurt that lay hidden within him and dissolve it the way a sudden summer storm must inevitably destroy every whirling spire of dry and forgotten dust in its path.
They kissed. Breast to breast. Bare skin to finest, smoothest cotton. Woman to man. Until it seemed the kiss must last into eternity.
But of course it couldn't. One of them had to move away from the other.
JoJo cried out wordlessly when Miles took a step backward. Her mouth ached for his, yearned to still be a part of his. But he held himself away from her firmly, something that closely resembled fear sweeping in to fill his eyes as he found her breast again and cupped it in his palm. "For God's sake," he murmured. "What the hell is this?"
My breast? JoJo didn't say it. Wanting more, always more, fully moistened and ready for the next, the most incredible and undeniable step, she shivered as the soft river of need began to keen inside her, leaving her defenseless and powerless to stop the flow of sweet, longing moisture between her legs from becoming a tidal wave that swept first inward, then outward in destructive currents that wanted to...did...drown every aching, tingling, doomed fiber of her.
"It's time," she whispered, turning slightly in his embrace. Turning just enough that she could point with an unsteady and barely-controllable hand to the bed that waited in the corner between the windows, where leaf-shadows flickered and fluttered.
She wanted to lie amidst those moving patterns. Wanted to feel the caress of them upon her soul at the same moment she felt the caress of Miles's flesh inside hers. Wanted to become a part of them in the same way he'd already become a part of her. An inextricable, inseparable part.
"What the hell is happening to me?" he demanded, but JoJo knew...instinct told her...he had gone beyond the point of truly caring about answers, beyond the point of being able to stop. Sweeping her off her feet for real now, lifting her with arms that no longer shook, but which rippled, massive and powerful, he swung her around easily. As if she weighed no more than the glint of sunlight on summer-warm air that whispered between the strands of her hair. Crossing the room in three long steps, the hard length of him thrusting powerfully against her with each, he laid her on the bed among rippling shadows. And she opened her eyes.
She had no memory of closing them. But they were closed. So she opened them to soft and slightly hazy afternoon sunlight that touched Miles's face and the long planes of his body as he undressed quickly, his shirt a mad and senseless swirl of white as he tossed it atop his already-discarded khakis in the farthest corner of the room. Gilded, dying sunrays dropped through rose-colored curtains, giving his face the deep-hued, fevered glow of a man possessed. A man stricken so desperately and so completely by desire that he could never go back to where or what he had been before.
"I don't know what this is," he murmured, kneeling over her to move his hands across her again, caressing her and worshiping her. "I don't know what's happened to me. And I don't much give a good goddamn. Because right now...right at this moment..." Finding the zipper of her skirt, he pulled it down. Lifting her hips, he slipped the skirt off. His breath rasped deep in his throat when he tossed it away and then quickly sent her slip and panties to join the increasingly senseless yet intrinsically sensible litter of discarded clothes strewn across the rose-colored velvet of the carpet.
At last they faced each other naked. Arms stretched out over her head, her hips and legs curled a little to one side in a sleek and sinuous, somehow suggestively demure curve, JoJo lay unmoving. Her heart once again took up an uneven beat, jerking in perfect sync with the insistent thrumming of the jade that lay atop it.
"You really are beautiful." Miles seemed stunned. More, even, than before. He paused for one last, eternal moment to gaze at her with astonished eyes that still, even in the heat of this moment of utter and absolute seduction, questioned what had happened to him.
It took all the strength JoJo could muster, but she somehow managed to lift her arms. Managed to reach for him and implore him, with wide eyes and a half-smile, to join her...in every possible way...before it was too late. Before she died from the desperation that had replaced that first warm tidal wave and turned it to a tropical storm inside her.
The sight of her seemed suddenly to be too much for him. Gleaming, glowing, his shaft a sun-dappled sculpture in the flickering and ever-changing light, he came into the circle of her embrace. Lowering himself to her, the heat of him was incredible. Beyond incredible. It was enough to scorch JoJo wherever he touched. As touch he did. Lowering himself still farther, he swung his hips gently so that the tip of his shaft brushed her abdomen with scalding strokes that threatened to brand her instantly as even the love charm hadn't. Instantly, and so permanently she could never hope to belong to anyone but him.
Her arms grew heavy. Suddenly, monstrously heavy. Unable to maintain the fragile grip they'd gained on his shoulders, unable to cling even enough to urge that wonderful, searching length to press itself harder against her and deeper into her, they fell. Useless. Back to the bed.
She could only lie beneath him, limp and expectant, watching him hesitate one last time as if locked in a futile struggle to regain the senses he'd lost in the instant when they'd met. Watching him battle destiny and lose.
Against her chest, the jade seemed to have grown excruciatingly hot. More, even, than the blast-furnace heat that radiated from every part of Miles as he bore down on her. The love charm...for wasn't that exactly what it was?...had certainly left its mark upon her. A mark made all the more deadly because it was invisible, seared into the hidden flesh surrounding her heart with such power, such extraordinary and mystical force that it extended deep into her innermost being. Into parts of her that would never be visible on the surface, but would carry the pattern of it forever.
"Christ," Miles murmured softly, almost reverently as he entered her. Without preliminaries, without the searching, teasing play she'd half-expected, he shoved the full, swollen length of himself into her. Shoved so far she wondered how she could remain whole beneath such a sudden and massive onslaught.
He entered her, and then he held himself there. Held himself motionless for a moment so that she could absorb the size and the heat of him.
He was bigger than she'd thought. Bigger than she'd expected. Magnificently big, extraordinarily big, holding her pinned like a butterfly against a velvet board, holding her to the bed with all of himself, every centimeter, inside her. The exquisite pressure tantalized. It made her yearn for more...for the sweet and inflammatory motions yet to come...motions that must come, and come soon.
"Miles," she whispered, her voice thin, reedy, hollow. "Please. I need..." She hesitated. Trembled. Wriggled slightly, not in any kind of attempt to escape, but only with the effort to urge him to more motion. Anticipated motion. Motion that once begun would have no end. Motion t hat would ease her agony, and his. "I need..."
She knew he wanted to succumb, needed to succumb. She could feel it in the sudden quaking tremor of the arms with which he held himself just slightly aloof from her even as he remained joined to her. But he managed to resist, seeming to exert every ounce of effort humanly possible to resist an enticement that throbbed in the heavy, sun-laden air between them.
"I wish I knew what the hell was going on here," he said, a trace of something that might be anger glittering in his eyes as he held her prisoner in exactly the way she'd prayed to be his prisoner. "I wish I knew just what the hell kind of witchcraft you worked on me."
"W...witchcraft?" That wasn't what she'd wanted to hear. Wasn't anything she'd expected to hear, though she was again conscious of the love charm, now a heavy and leaden lump between her breasts. Lifeless and spent, it seemed just another bit of rock threaded onto cheap string. Frivolous. Ridiculous. Silly. "Miles, I don't know what..." Once again summoning a strength she'd never dreamed she possessed, she managed to place her hands on his hips and pull a little, desperately, urging them for God's sweet sake to move!
"I think you do," he declared as his body began to respond, accepting her invitation even when it was obvious his mind had meant to resist. "I think you know exactly what I'm talking about."
"You don't..." JoJo gasped a little as he withdrew slightly, altered his angle, then penetrated slowly this time. As if he meant to prolong her agony. As if he delighted in prolonging it. "You don't really believe in witchcraft?"
"I'm here, aren't I?" His hips had taken up a slow rhythm. A lazy but insistent one that all women are born to know intimately somehow, from the moment of first consciousness. "Christ, I don't know what the hell I believe any more. An hour ago, two hours, I'd have laughed at the idea. But I'm here. With my cock buried in a woman I barely know. And that's something I nev..."
"Please?" JoJo felt her eyes grow wider. Imploring. She tightened around his shaft, fearing she was about to be abandoned.
She'd do anything to stop that happening.
"Please, what?"
"You're..." He was what? Hurting her?
Not exactly. It was more like he was tantalizing her, but giving no promise she'd ever be able to claim the prize. Except...
Hadn't she already claimed it? Even if he wasn't ready to admit it?
"You're..."
"I don't make it a habit to fuck women I barely know," he gritted through clenched teeth as the rhythm of his hips grew faster. As it grew more urgent, as it grew more insistent.
Sweat beaded on his forehead. Trickling to the sides, it dampened soft waves of dark hair around his temples.
He was inside JoJo's heart now, as well as inside her body. All of him. All the way. There would be no turning away from him now. Not again. Not ever.
Sighing, moaning the tiniest bit, she closed her eyes and opened her legs wider still, inviting him to do what she wanted.
She was a sweet and soothing breeze come to cool a soul burnt brittle with torment. She was the balm Miles needed desperately if he was ever to survive, and yet one he could not accept precisely because he had survived.
She was a solution, an enigma, a relief. A dilemma. An impossibility.
She frightened him. Because she'd turned him all around. Because she'd turned him upside down and inside out, and left him no choice.
He didn't know how she'd done it. In a moment of anger and frustration, he'd accused her of witchcraft then immediately felt foolish and infantile. But the idea persisted. It haunted him, filling the inside of his head, refusing to let him go.
But...witchcraft?
How asinine.
Everyone knew there was no such thing. If there was, Shirl would still be alive. If there was, he would still be whole and the world would be whole, and everyone would be safe again. As safe as they'd been before...everyone would simply be again.
Still, witchcraft seemed as good an explanation as any. It seemed better than most, for the completely inexplicable thing this brown-haired, brown-eyed beauty named JoJo had done to him.
Every time he touched her...hell, every time he came near her, he felt the strangest thing. Like something had struck a chord deep inside him. Something had started bizarre, never-before-heard music in every cell of his body. Music that couldn't be stopped and couldn't be ignored, because it was a sympathetic music that seemed to happen for both of them at the same time, the melodies of one feeding upon the symphony that was the other until both grew saturated. Both grew strong, yet incredibly weak, and vulnerable to the unheard, soul-felt music of the other.
Miles wasn't a poetic man. He never had been. But that was how he felt now. Poetic. As if JoJo Hammond was the most wonderful poetry, the most lyrical and musical, that had ever existed. As if, every time he got within ten feet of her, she sent it flowing into him and through him.
Music. Poetry. That was the only way he could explain what he felt for her.
And what had he done in return? Rammed himself into her. Thanklessly, shamelessly, so hard and so brutally that he'd known even as he was doing it that he was wrong, wrong, wrong. He'd expected her to scream in agony. To beg for mercy or maybe to totoaccuse him of violating her and call him the kind of filthy names he deserved.
He'd been scared half-shitless when she hadn't. And that was one hell of a laugh, because when he got right down to it, she was the one who'd practically violated him. Right out in the open, right there in Chinatown.
He doubted there was a soul...a single, solitary sane and sensible soul...on that street who hadn't known she'd wanted to fuck him on the spot, until he was the one who had to beg for mercy.
Sure as hell, the old lady had known. He'd seen her, lurking in the shadows of the alley from which JoJo had appeared like some kind of goddamned mystical siren, singing some kind of weird song only he'd been able to hear. He'd seen the old lady, and he'd never forget her. Not if he lived to be a hundred. She'd been older than God himself, as his mother used to say. She'd been old, and she'd been smiling. Nodding. Looking at JoJo and then looking at him, like she knew exactly what was going on between them because she somehow thought she was responsible. Like the sudden, bizarre and terrifying attraction was only to be expected, and she heartily endorsed it.
"I don't know what the hell you did to me." His hips had started moving almost on their own. He tried to clamp on the brakes, and clamp them on hard. Tried to tell himself this was a mistake, a serious one, and he had to stop. And finally he managed. Right there in mid-stroke, with her halfway on him and halfway off, his cock aching like it was being roasted alive in the soft and wet smoothness of her. A softness, a wetness that, despite all his wishes and all his desires, seemed perfect. Absolutely, insanely, made-to-order perfect. "Did you give me some kind of drug?" he demanded. Barely in control, he held himself deliberately still for a moment before thrusting again. Harder. Feeling a small, hot spurt of guilt when JoJo groaned and began to struggle beneath him.
Christ, he couldn't do it to her. Couldn't hurt her in a million years. Because she was perfect. The most perfect woman, the most perfect fit, he'd ever known. Smoother than the smoothest satin, her flesh had tightened around him, snugging around him and enveloping as deftly as a silken-leather glove that had been designed and made just for him. She clung to him with her moist flesh, and each and every last cell of it sang to him...literally sang! Hearing the music, the siren song, again, he gentled his movements. He eased the pressure he'd been exerting, so that each long and silvery stroke of his shaft against the inside of her ended with a sigh instead of a crash.
In reply, JoJo held him even more tightly. So tightly that he suddenly, seriously worried he might not be able to withdraw unless he used exactly the kind of undue force he'd sought to avoid. He worried he might be forced...make that delighted...to spend the rest of his life trapped where he was. Trapped within her. Imprisoned by the magical aura that held him to her, and her to him.
Oh, Christ. Warm color, the color of unabashed desire, flooded her cheeks, her throat and shoulders, and the softly delectable mounds of rose-tipped breasts that strained against his chest, caressing with pure fire every time he drew close to her. He'd thought at first that the color came from the drapes, or was maybe a reflection from the deep-pink carpet that made him feel like he was floating on a sea made up of millions and millions of roses. But now he knew better. It was the color of her. The natural, inescapable color of an essence so rosy, creamy, peachy-pink and delectable that he thought he was going to lose his mind. Thought he was going to rupture a blood vessel just as he'd sometimes feared, and end up a vegetable for the rest of his life.
And wouldn't that be wonderful?
Wouldn't this be the perfect way to check out, with his mind shot and the last little remnants of it fixed forever on one conscious memory of hot, deliriously hot flesh that cocooned him and...
Miles yanked himself back to reality. Just barely.
"What the hell did you give me?" he demanded, thrusting forward again, still gently but with enough force to hold her to the bed as firmly as it was physically possible to hold her without damaging her. And felt a soft burst of astonishment when she only opened herself wider, as if she wanted him to do more. Fuck her more. Fuck her harder. "Was it roofies? Is that it? You slipped me some kind of date-rape drug in my tea, and now you're..."
"No one's holding you here against your will." She looked hurt.
Shit. That look. That agony, in the loveliest, sweetest, clearest eyes he'd ever seen.
Shit. That was what he felt like, for even thinking such a thing, much less saying it out loud, and right to her face. A big, steaming, stinking pile of unadulterated excrement. But his mind kept searching for an explanation. Going around and around and around, refusing to accept the notion that it could have been...must have been...witchcraft.
"You had to give me something. There's no other way I'd have..."
"No way?" She had that look again. And he wanted to cry. Almost did cry.
"Oh, Christ, Jo. No. I didn't mean that...didn't mean..." He wanted to kiss her. Wanted to make her smile again. Wanted to taste the warm cinnamon flavor of her lips, and then he wanted to tease her. Play with her. Love her. Until...
Christ almighty! He stopped again, right in mid-stroke. Simply froze solid, his muscles refusing to respond to even the most heated of commands, his heart trying to grind to a halt inside his chest. For a second, poised with his shaft halfway in and halfway out of her, he thought it had stopped.
Love her? Where the hell had that come from?
If there was one single thing in the world he didn't deserve, it was to love anyone. Ever again. After what he'd done...after he'd abandoned Shirl in order to save his own damned, miserable, cowardly hide, love was unthinkable. It was to be denied. Would be denied, forever. And yet there it was.
He wanted JoJo. Wanted her love. Wanted to do everything imaginable to convince her to love him, to give him a second chance and let him prove he could be something other than the low, cowardly, unconscionable dog he'd been in the past. More than that, he wanted to do anything...everything...he could to please her. To pleasure her, and satisfy her in ways he'd never satisfied anyone. Including, God help him, Shirl.
"You're free to leave if you want to." JoJo's eyes still carried that anguished expression. And traces of it had crept into her voice now, too.
"It's just that..." How the hell much longer was he going to be able to hover like this, anyway...unable to decide if he should go on, should plunge back into her the way his cock demanded he plunge, or if he should leave her now? Leave her completely, the way she'd said he could? "Christ almighty, what you must think of me, grabbing you off the street. Dragging you here, like some kind of..."
"You didn't grab, Miles." Still watching him with guarded, ready-to-be-hurt-again eyes, she wriggled beneath him. Around him. On him. A very little, as if she knew how it enticed him. How it drew him in, and...his cock kicked. It jerked, danced, dragged him forward. Taking back the control he'd so obviously lost, it buried itself exactly where it wanted to be. Deep, deep, deep within the safe and sheltering warmth of her. "And you didn't drag, either."
"It's just that...JoJo, I don't fuck..."
"Really." A smile flicked across her face, there and then gone again in all of one second. "Then what am I? Fantasy? A ghost?" Slowly, deliberately, her body curving in a pattern he couldn't resist even if he'd wanted to, she shook her head. Shook out wave after wave of gleaming, chestnut-brown...had he ever actually thought it was just plain brown?...hair, and smiled at him again.
"Look." He bit back a shout of laughter. Of triumph and gladness. "You've got me so frazzled I don't know what I'm doing any more. Don't know what I'm thinking, or..."
Then she wrapped her legs around him. Wrapped them around his waist and tightened their grip, pulling him into her. So far into her, sheathing him all the way to the root of his shaft with the steaming velvet of her that he couldn't imagine how he managed to breathe, much less think about thinking.
She'd gained the upper hand, and that tiny half-smile that kept playing and re-playing across her lips, a Mona Lisa smile if he'd ever seen one, said she knew it. Said she was enjoying every second of this. And she moved again, too. In that inhuman way that made him want to die. That made his cock jerk, and thrust, and throb. That made his cock literally scream for mercy. Sweet Jesus, just a little mercy!
"Christ. Shit. Damn." He held himself still. Tried to hold himself still, to show her who was the boss. But it was no use. That sensation, of her clinging to him with flesh so greedy and demanding that it was the living, breathing dream of any man under the age of a hundred and fifty, was too much for him. It broke him down. Slowly. No matter what else he tried to tell it to do, his cock eased itself into her the barest fraction of a degree at a time. Calculating carefully, watching her face to gauge the effect of everything he was doing, he began to move his hips. First from side to side, always taking enormous care to stay deep inside her, never varying the depth of his penetration, he rocked back and forth atop her. Evenly. Rhythmically. Repeatedly.
Eyes closed, a tiny smile curved the corners of her mouth and her lips, deep-red and swollen with passion, pursed into a shimmering bud he wanted, suddenly needed, to feel against his shaft.
Except that his shaft was already occupied. Deeply, deliriously occupied, in ways that were damned sure to keep it occupied for some time to come.
"Sweet Jesus." He had to be under the influence of...something. For the life of him, he didn't see how she could have slipped him any kind of drug. Not on the street, anyway, and that was where his problem had really begun. In that one split-second when...
His cock jerked. Once, then twice. Gasping for breath, he tried to pull back. Did pull back, only to have some force beyond himself and yet a part of himself, some instinct that would not be denied and would not be overridden, urge him to shove downward again, giving her just a hair's breadth of relief before he plunged all the way home.
JoJo cried out. He thought she said his name. Her face a blur, her hands small, and hot, and desperate, she clutched at his shoulders. Nipped at the side of his neck with teeth that grazed and pinched, never drawing blood. But his hearing was one more of those things he couldn't rely upon any more. It was right up there with common sense, good judgment, and clear thinking that had made a clean sweep of all the top spots on his defective-items-to-be-recalled list.
JoJo's hand came up to cover and surround the strange piece of murky greenish stone she wore around her neck. It was an unattractive thing, nearly as big as her hand, but small enough she could cover it easily and cling to it the way her body clung to his. As if the stone was some kind of lifeline she depended upon to keep her from drowning or getting in too deep, going too far, doing things she'd never meant to do. But she'd already drowned. Miles knew it, even if she apparently didn't. She'd already grown wet inside, and in the instant that her hand found the slice of stone, she grew wetter still. With a smooth and penetrating moisture that softened her and made his entry easier. Made it easier to withdraw, too, though he took care not to pull back too far, not to pull back all the way.
Caught up in the spell of the increasing moisture that seemed to flow from every single cell in her body, beguiled and enticed by the soft promise of flesh he could no more resist than the tides could resist the pull of the moon, Miles heard nothing as clearly as he heard the sound of his own breathing. Even his heart seemed to have ceased its frantic beating, and all the traffic of Manhattan to have ground to a halt beyond the bedroom windows, the entire world caught up in gridlock made solely of his need, his desire, his desperation.
"JoJo, I..." Savoring the intensity of the wine-dark, burgundy-rich fire that must ultimately, soon, consume them both, Miles began what could well be his last entry. The last push of his aching, throbbing, stressed-beyond-capacity and brimming shaft into her. "Don't..." But it wasn't the last. Pulling himself free all the way to his throbbing, nerve-wracked tip that felt nothing now but an ache so searing, so intense and all consuming that it must incinerate his flesh and leave him helpless and emasculated, he struggled to speak. "Know..." But that was all he could say. Because he was all the way inside her again. He was inside her and her mouth had captured a small fold of flesh near the base of his neck. "Oh, Christ almighty!" He screamed. He actually screamed when she began to worry it with teeth and lips and tongue, as if she thought that was the way to drain from him all essence of who he was, and what he was, and what he had to give her.
But that wasn't the way. That wasn't...
Going very still beneath him, she gave a tiny, jubilant hiss of satisfaction when he found his home in the depth of her again, repeatedly and with renewed vigor as his body took up the eager rhythm of searing, gliding strokes that only added to the killing pressure in his balls. The demand to find release, and find it soon. Or else die.
She'd been made for him. Slipping out of her, inserting himself back into her, Miles knew it. Just as he knew it had been her, and only her who'd brought him back to life again, long after he'd concluded life was impossible and maybe even undesirable.
She'd brought him to life, even if that was the last thing he'd wanted. Even if...
She tightened her legs around him. Entwined them mercilessly, twisting her feet together at an angle that cupped the cheeks of his ass and prevented him leaving her. That forced him to penetrate as deeply as he had with the very first stroke of his deliriously swollen, hopelessly smitten shaft. In that moment he felt a stirring deep inside, in some dark and forgotten place. Something that hadn't stirred in years.
His cock gave another jerk. A massive one this time. A breathtaking one that seemed to originate deep down inside his balls, where the pressure was now intolerable. Where the explosion was building and building, burning and struggling to find its way to the surface.
For a minute he thought someone had grabbed him with an open hand and clenched invisible fingers around him. Fingers that clawed at him and twisted mercilessly, torturing his cock and his balls so that despite the horrible and terrible need to let go, he was never going to be able to let go. Never going to be able to do anything but pray for the relief that couldn't possibly come.
"JoJo?"
"What?"
"Sweet Jesus, let me..."
The tide of moisture flowing inside her body increased. It grew and grew as she became still beneath him. A sudden sheen of sweat filmed her face, making it glow in a way he'd never before seen a woman's face glow. Her hair turned suddenly wet with sweat, dark with it, and slowly, by faltering and grudging degrees, his body grew as slippery and gleaming as hers.
"What's happening?" he whispered, and there was no longer any demand in the question. There was nothing but quavered entreaty, shot through with the real, pungent stirring of fear that this woman really had done something to him. Something from which he was never going to recover.
Her reply was garbled. Uttered on a swift and sharp intake of breath, it was blown away by the groaned exhalation that followed, made even more indecipherable by the clenching of her teeth and the low mewl of a growl that filled the bottom of her throat.
With every successive and unstoppable stroke of his body into hers, he needed release more, needed rest. But she would have none of it. The legs she'd locked around him helped him...forced him...to enter her, and then they worked against him on every equally long, equally treacherous attempt to retreat from her.
Miles felt a tear run down his cheek. Felt it cling to the edge of his jaw for a second, then felt it release and fall onto JoJo's shoulder, or maybe onto her white and exposed throat.
If she saw the tear, if she felt it or recognized it, she gave no sign.
Her body had begun to flow again. She was coming for a second time, and he hadn't even managed the first. She was holding him with the legs that trapped him, her body moistening itself and him, yet refusing to allow him...allow him?...to achieve his own satisfaction until he'd...
Riveted to his, her gaze suddenly softened. No longer seeming to want to steal his soul, the way the members of some primitive tribes hidden away in the jungle believed a photograph could steal theirs, it did anyway. Stole his soul.
And there wasn't a goddamned thing he could do about it.
Because he was hooked. Addicted to something he'd found in her, something he was never, ever going to be satisfied to live without again. Addicted, and incapable of being whole again unless he could have JoJo Hammond in unrestricted, unlimited quantities for the rest of his life, right up until the instant he died.
Bucking suddenly beneath him, and violently, as if an electrical current had been applied to her body, JoJo cried out in a hoarse and husky voice that sounded like none he'd ever heard before. Letting go of his ass, she planted her feet on the bed. Planted them firmly, so she could shove with them and lift her hips to him. So she could meet him and twist on him, and twist around him in the moment that she finally, almost too late, gave him the permission for which he'd waited.
"Christ." The throbbing in his cock was too severe, the deep and heavy sensation inside his balls too intense. For a minute, suffering and confused, he feared that now that the moment had come, he wouldn't be able to...wouldn't be capable of...and then he came. Drained himself dry, sucked every bit of essence from every deep and hidden crevasse of himself, and pumped it into her waiting warmth, every pulse and every beat of his heart slamming through the tortured, struggling shaft that could scarcely believe the release it had found.
Suddenly tensing, JoJo whipped her head from side to side. Violently. So violently he wondered why she didn't inflict some terrible, terminal damage on herself. One more time, she came. In a sudden and incinerating gush that was everything he could have hoped for yet like nothing he could ever have dreamed. Moist heat flowed out of her and over her, over him, over the hands she'd somehow, at some point, slipped beneath her ass to steady herself upon him.
She came, and that, finally, was too much for him. Too much for his crazed, overburdened and overstressed cock.
Miles came, too, in a long and giddy explosion of relief that mingled his fluids with hers in some kind of potent, heady brew that seemed even more important, even more irreversible than this strange, preordained coupling of their bodies.
He came, and in the process he saw stars. All kinds of stars. Green ones and blue ones. Red ones, and the most vivid, most incandescent and pulsating golden ones that seared their images into the backs of his eyes so he would never be without them again.
Sweet gold. Blinding, illuminating, warming gold.
He wasn't, he thought as he gave one last, mighty, already-faltering shove into the vast and seething ocean that lay at the core of her, ever going to be the same again. JoJo had seen to that.
Crazily beautiful, indescribably desirable JoJo. There was something about her. Something...he must be out of his mind even to think it...magical.
Sometime during the night, the love charm had lost its ability to hum.
JoJo woke slowly, tangled in sheets that had lost all semblance of order or crispness hours before. Still aching, her body exhausted by the strange and surreal waves of energy that had carried her through the night, energy that had seemed to have its source someplace other than within her or Miles, she lay still for a moment, staring at the faint sway of shadows on the white-painted ceiling.
The palm-sized slab of jade lay in its place between her breasts, but it felt cold now. Lifeless. When she lifted it close to her eyes to inspect it in the long column of early sunlight that dropped through the window on the street side of the room, it was no longer translucent. No longer shimmering with the soft green light that had made it so irresistible...that had made her want to touch it, to hold it and keep it close to her heart.
It was only a slab of rock. A barely attractive one. Now it seemed thicker, the color grayish in hue, the fresh and enticing green gone slightly muddy, mottled with unappetizing flecks of grainy white.
That was strange. Stranger than strange.
For a minute, her mind all fuzzy with sleep and unable to focus properly, she could only stare at it, struggling to equate this unattractive lump of nothing with the lovely, carved thing she'd accepted just yesterday in a fit of passion so inexplicable and so overwhelming it still made her head spin.
The same passion that had made her throw herself headfirst at Miles?
Miles!
She awoke all the way, with a jerk that made her head spin for real. "Miles?" Rolling over, fighting the twisted and snarled sheets, she looked at the other side of the king-sized bed.
It was empty.
"Miles?"
She got no answer.
The bathroom door was closed, and she stared at it for a moment. No light seeped around the edges, but then the building was old. The door was old, and no doubt fit more snugly into its frame than a modern door. She wouldn't necessarily be able to see the light if it was on
"Miles?" Listening, she sat up.
There was no sound from the bathroom, either. After a long moment filled with a sudden rising of dread and uncertainty, she swung her feet to the floor and rose, clutching the sheet tight around her.
"Miles, are you..." When she reached the bathroom door and shoved it open, the room was empty. Dark. The sink, when she felt it with a shaking hand, was dry. And so was the shower.
"Miles?"
She knew the worst already, but she couldn't accept it. Not yet, not without making every effort to believe it wasn't true, couldn't be true. Turning around and around, circling like a lost and bewildered thing, she wandered back into the room, coming to a stop at last in the center of the rose-colored carpet.
He'd picked up her clothes and arranged them carefully on the room's one chair, her blouse a brilliant red splash draped across its back, her skirt and slip and panties folded in a neat pile on the seat. But his clothes were gone.
He was gone.
She'd been abandoned, and tears filled her eyes. She wasn't the crying kind, had never in her life thought any boy or man was worth crying for or that crying could ever do one single bit of good. But she felt herself starting to cry now. Really cry. And once started, she knew she'd never be able to stop. So she blinked her eyes furiously, determined to hold herself in check at all costs, and wandered across the room to the chair where he'd left her things...the little desk chair that sat near the window overlooking the leafy courtyard. Brushing the neatly-folded clothing onto the floor, she sat and stared down at sunlight that this morning seemed harsh and glaring as it bleached the color from leaves on the trees and flowers that filled concrete urns, feeble in their attempts to insert brilliance into a day gone gray and dull with loss.
Miles. She couldn't live without him. Hadn't wanted to believe it during the night, when he'd been by her side, but believed it now. She'd thought he felt the same. Believed...or was it hoped?...with all her heart, based on the soft and urgent murmurings in fading sunlight and then in darkness, from the way he'd whispered her name and reached for her, repeatedly and urgently, that he felt the same. But now he was gone. Just like that. He'd left her without so much as a word or a touch, or...anything.
He'd gone, and she was alone, and it was time to face facts, bitter and unacceptable as they might be. In a few more hours, this afternoon, she'd be heading for the airport. For the flight that would take her back to Erie and out of his life. Out of this wonderful, sparkling and shimmering city that she suddenly didn't want to leave for anything.
She couldn't live without him.
Did anything else in the world matter?
Lifting the cold and lifeless pendant that no longer seemed so much to be carved from jade as from some nondescript, cheap, mongrel look-alike stone, she turned it over in her hand. Turned it over, and over, and over, trying hard to make some sense of what had happened to her in the last twenty-four hours.
Trying, and failing.
She couldn't live without him.
Slowly, slowly, she got to her feet. Just as slowly, she retrieved her panties and pulled them on.
Had he even told her where he lived?
Moving like an old, old woman with a bad case of arthritis, she pulled on her slip and then her rumpled red silk shirt, pulling it up across her arms and onto her shoulders, buttoning plain buttons that had seemed such exotic, dainty and precious pearls last night, when his large hands had been working so diligently to unfasten them.
Manhattan, somewhere.
She remembered him saying something, at some point, about an apartment in Manhattan. Picking her skirt up off the floor, she stepped into it. It was in a little better shape than her blouse, thanks mostly to the amount of polyester in the blend. But not much better. She still looked like a waif. A ragamuffin. A vagabond from sanity, and sensibility, and...
Manhattan was a big place. An awfully big place. And what in the hell did she think she was going to do if she did remember where he lived, anyway? Arrive at his door unannounced? Pound on it, and demand he take her in? Demand he give her more than what he'd obviously meant to give her...a delightful if impromptu one-night stand that was exactly that? A one-night stand?
Gathering the rest of her things...her purse, her sunglasses, the small bag containing the Map of Manhattan necktie and the six colored paper lanterns she'd bought to take home to Erie as souvenirs, she left her key inside the room and let herself out into the hall.
At least Miles had paid for the room last night...had put it on his credit card. He'd been that much of a gentleman, anyway.
At the bottom of the stairs, the night manager...or maybe it was the day manager...she didn't know because she was on vacation and hadn't taken her watch out of her suitcase in days...smiled at her. "Good morning," he said. "Coffee? The bistro is just about to open."
"No," she replied, then immediately changed her mind. "Yes. And can someone bring me a phone book?"
"Manhattan?"
Nodding, she looked directly into the young man's eyes, the way she'd looked into Miles's yesterday.
The love charm hung limp and still around her neck, more an unpleasant weight now than a pleasure to wear. It gave no softly thrumming vibration, emitted no hum, no heat, no murmur of music.
It was dead.
Stone cold dead.
Or this man wasn't the man for whom it had been designed to sing.
When he waved her toward the courtyard café, she stepped out through the side door and took a seat at one of the tiny iron tables in the dappled, shifting sunlight. Two minutes later, she had a cup of steaming coffee...decaf, with cream...at her elbow, and a Manhattan phone book the size of a small encyclopedia opened on the table in front of her.
Miles Ashton. A name she should forget, but never would. Not if she lived to be a hundred and twenty, and not even if she forgot every other detail of her life, including her own name.
Miles Ashton. What were the chances...
What, indeed?
There was one Miles Ashton listed for Manhattan. One Miles, and no Ms, in about thirty Ashtons. Of course, he could have an unlisted number. But somehow, sitting in the dappled light with her mug of coffee cooling next to her as she ran her fingertips over the close-packed names in the directory, JoJo felt certain this was the entry. More than certain.
This one Miles Ashton was her Miles Ashton. The love charm would make sure of it. Dropping two dollars on the table, she waved at the manager. "Call me a cab?"
"There's one outside right now," he said, already on his way to the door.
Fifteen minutes later, she stood on the sidewalk in front of his address, her mouth open in astonishment and her head craned back like a newly-arrived hick from the sticks, which she basically was, staring up in consternation at the biggest and tallest apartment building she'd ever seen.
The doorman stood back from the sidewalk, beneath the shade of a deep-green awning, and he was watching her. Had been watching her, with something approaching hostility, from the moment she'd stepped out of the taxi. When she at last shook herself out of her astonishment and moved toward the enormous double glass doors, he stepped into her path. "Can I help you?"
"Yes. I'm looking for Miles Ashton."
He never batted an eyelash. "Is Mr. Ashton expecting you?"
"No...I..."
"I'm afraid I can't let you inside without his permission."
JoJo felt her shoulders sag. She wondered what floor Miles lived on, and whether it was really possible for humans to suddenly develop super-hero-type abilities that would allow them to scale the outside of glass-and-steel towers. Of course, this one had balconies aligned in neat rows along its sides, which could only be an advantage for super heroes who found themselves forced to...
The doorman was still eyeing her, his suspicion all the way out in the open now.
What the devil did he take her for, anyway?
An insane wife?
The thought gave her pause. More than a little pause. Miles could very well have just that. An insane wife lurking in the bushes somewhere, waiting to pounce. For that matter, he could have a not-so-insane wife lurking right here, in an apartment on some floor of this enormous, unfathomably enormous building. She knew nothing about him, after all. Nothing but that he was inventive in bed, a kind and considerate lover who'd seemed to place more importance on her satisfaction than on his own. So even if there wasn't a wife, legitimate or insane or something else somewhere, JoJo could certainly fit the bill for one. Just like she could fit the bill for an insane girlfriend, an insane stalker, an insane reporter, an insane...well, the list went on and on. And the doorman seemed all too aware of it. Making himself more door than man, he'd taken up a position squarely in front of those glass doors, so she'd have to go through him if she ever hoped to set foot inside.
"Is there a place where I can call him?"
The doorman eyed her skeptically for another moment before, stepping aside with obvious reluctance, he opened one of the doors and indicated a phone mounted on the wall just inside. "Dial zero. The operator will connect you."
Operator? JoJo shook her head a little. Some building.
They didn't have telephone operators in apartment buildings back where she came from. At least, they didn't have them in any building she'd ever seen.
The operator answered immediately, and put her through to Miles's apartment just as quickly.
His phone rang twice. Four times. Six times. At the eighth ring she was just getting ready to hang up and admit defeat, when someone answered clumsily, with a crash and a ringing thud that suggested the phone had fallen to the floor. "Hello?" It was Miles, and he sounded groggy. He sounded like a man who'd really tied one on last night.
"Miles." In the instant when she spoke, JoJo knew this hadn't been a good idea. Knew, in fact, that it been a very very bad idea. She'd just made herself look like something worse than an insane stalker. Something much worse.
She'd just made herself look desperate. Pathetically, laughably desperate.
"JoJo." He sounded resigned. Like he thought she was pretty desperate and pathetic, too.
"I'm sorry. I shouldn't have..."
"How'd you get my number?"
She fought back a near-hysterical giggle that would only, could only, lead to tears of sheer frustration if she let it go. "It's in the phone book."
"Oh." There was that resigned note again. "Yeah. I forgot about that."
But she'd just bet a good, damned dollar he wouldn't forget to have it removed the next time the book came out!
"Look," she babbled, not knowing how to get herself out of this mess now that she'd gotten in. "I know this is a bad idea, a really stupid one, and I...but I was surprised when you...I just thought I should..."
"Wait! Whoa, whoa!" JoJo could just picture him sitting on the edge of his bed. It was probably a sleek, modern thing, black enamel maybe, with plaid sheets. She could just imagine him pinching the bridge of his nose between his thumb and his first finger, wincing, wondering how in the hell he was going to get rid of this woman who wouldn't leave him alone. "Slow down."
The way she'd started to wonder herself, with a cold and leaden sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach.
"I'm sorry, Miles." Why the hell couldn't she stop saying that? "I was just...surprised...when I woke up and found you gone this morning. I wasn't expecting that, and I wondered...I mean, if I did something wrong, something to offend you..."
He sighed. Heavily. "You didn't."
"Really? I was just hoping we might at least have a cup of coffee before I have to go back to the hotel to pack and head for the airport. I was hoping you'd come downstairs, and we could go somewhere."
"I don't think coffee's a good idea."
"Really?" She felt another burst of that inane, pathetic babbling coming on, but there really didn't seem to be anything she could do to stop it. "If not coffee, then..."
"Look. JoJo. I don't know what happened yesterday. I have a feeling I'm never going to understand what the hell happened. It certainly wasn't like anything I've ever done before, or even thought of doing. For sure, it's not something I'm likely to ever do again. So I think it's best if we just cut our losses. Go our separate ways, and try to forget we were dumb enough to get so carried away."
"Dumb?" Forget? JoJo's voice trembled, near the tears she'd managed to stave off before, but which she doubted she'd handle nearly as well this time around.
There was a long silence at the other end of the line. "I guess I phrased that badly."
She nodded her head vigorously. "I would say so!"
"I just don't see what would be the point in having coffee. I don't see what good could ever come of prolonging this...whatever it was that we had. You're leaving. Going home, the way you should. Because that's where you belong. Believe me, JoJo. Over time, you'll forget. Over time, you'll..."
There was that word again. That one, odious and completely revolting word. Forget.
JoJo knew she wasn't going to forget anything. Not when her heart was breaking, literally tearing itself into little, tiny, quivering bits. She had no idea why it was doing that. She certainly hadn't asked it to do that, hadn't asked it to throw itself so heedlessly at some man she'd only been passing in the street, even if that man was the most gorgeous, the most devilishly sexy and desirable, the most...
And there she went again. Off on another of her little psychotic breaks.
"JoJo?" Miles sounded concerned.
"I'm sorry." Right on cue with that one. "I just thought, well, I don't know what I thought. Maybe I wasn't thinking." Her voice stumbled. Caught. Almost shattered. "Good-bye, Miles."
"Wait, are you sure you're all right?"
"I'm fine," she mumbled, sounding anything but fine, and dropped the phone receiver back onto the hook quickly before she could launch herself into another round of pleas and apologies.
It was quite obvious begging and pleading wasn't going to do anything to help her. Quite obvious she'd been given the brush-off, big-time, and had better go on about her life and do just what he'd told her to do.
Forget about it. Forget about him.
The doorman had seen her hang up the phone. He'd pulled the door open and was holding it for her, his look not so much suspicious now as it was mildly sympathetic. "Is there anything I can do for you, Miss?"
"Yes." Lifting her head, she smiled as brightly as she could, and just hoped the smile didn't look as pathetic and foolish as all the rest of her felt. "Get me a cab."
"Right away." He stepped to the curb. Raised his arm.
A taxi materialized as if from out of nowhere.
Amazing. Astonishing.
JoJo had tried to hail cabs herself during her week in Manhattan. She'd tried several times. She didn't know if it was the word 'hick' that must surely be emblazoned across her forehead, or the fact that she wore clothes that weren't exactly the latest in New York chic, or maybe the fact that she was a little tentative in the way she'd tried to hail them, a little slow, but as far as New York cabbies had been concerned, she'd been entirely invisible.
But you could always count on a good doorman...
He opened the door for her, obviously eager to get her off the premises.
JoJo got in, and when the cabbie looked in the mirror expectantly, she said the first thing that popped into her head.
"Chinatown."
Shit.
Dropping the receiver back into its cradle, shit was exactly what Miles felt like. Again. Just like before. Just like at the hotel when he'd known he was going to ditch her, but hadn't been able to stop himself from taking advantage of her first. A whole steaming, stinking pile of fresh shit on a gray marble floor inside his front door.
He'd heard such pain in JoJo's voice. He'd heard so much longing, of a kind he knew would never, ever be eased. In much the same way his own pain at the loss of her could never possibly be eased.
Dragging his hands back through his hair, he crossed to the window...the double wide sliding door that opened onto his narrow strip of iron-railed balcony overlooking the whole sweeping panorama of lower Manhattan.
"Shit."
He didn't know what he felt like any more. Didn't know how he felt, or how he was supposed to feel. Most of all, he didn't know what had come over him in the past day. Didn't know what the hell kind of ton of bricks had slapped him upside the head down there in Chinatown, when he'd turned around and seen the radiant, shining...didn't even know what in the creeping hell he'd been doing in Chinatown in the first place.
"Shit!"
He'd been stupid. Really, really stupid. More stupid than he'd ever been, and that was saying something. Leaping away from the door, he grabbed for the clothes he'd tossed across the back of the sofa earlier in the morning, when he'd crept into the apartment as guiltily as if he really had just shit on somebody's pristine marble floor. At the Met, maybe. Or in a church somewhere.
The clothes were rumpled. Obviously worn, and badly in need of replacement. But he didn't have the time...didn't have the desire...to run back to the bedroom and waste even the one or two minutes it would take to retrieve something fresh, neat, and new.
Time was of the essence. He didn't know where JoJo was staying, didn't know what time her flight left, or from which airport. Didn't even know for sure where he could find her later, if she did manage to slip out of town and out of his life.
Time was of the essence, all right, and it was wasting.
Barely stopping to make sure the keys to his Hummer were in the pocket of the jacket he grabbed, he flung himself out of the apartment, letting the door crash back against the wall in a way that would no doubt have a sternly-worded note from the co-op board in his mailbox before the day was out. Having nothing else to lose, he slammed it shut with an equally loud bang and sprinted for the elevator. He pushed the button and...
Looking up at the lighted numbers above each of the elevators, he wanted to scream. Leaning his forehead against the polished mirror mounted between two of them, he almost did.
Four of them were at the lobby. One was dark, meaning it was out of service, and the last was on six and grinding its way downward. Grinding its way oh, so Christ-in-heaven slowly downward.
He was going to be stuck here. Waiting until he was an old, old man, too feeble and too senile to remember what he'd been about to do. Waiting until all hope of ever seeing JoJo again was gone.
He hammered on the button. Looked from one elevator to another, desperate, checking to see what floor they were on now. There were three at the lobby. One remained impassively dark, one was descending through four, and the last had begun to crawl upward. The last was barely passing two.
Thirty-one floors. Thirty-one cock-sucking, Christ-hating, mother-humping floors.
Turning slowly, feeling the air trying to drag him back and stop him before he could finish, he faced the stairway door and glared at it. Briefly. Considering.
It was a way. But...
A flashback hit him. It hit him hard.
The World Trade Center. The day the planes struck. He'd been inside the first tower, with no choice but to stumble down thirty-five flights to the ground. Only four more than he'd have to negotiate now. Four. An inconsequential number, really, if he'd stop to think about it rationally. But, hell, who had come out of that horror rational, anyway?
Certainly not him. Among all the other things he hadn't forgotten...would never forget...about that incredibly evil, still-unthinkable act of madness, was the magnitude of the pain in his legs and his lungs when he'd reached the bottom. He'd never forgotten the horror of being barely able to walk, much less run for his life when the entire world started to unravel around him and above him.
He'd been damned lucky to survive. It had been a fluke...the sheerest, most against-the-odds fluke any man had ever encountered...that had him on thirty-five at that exact moment and not higher up, not on his own floor, where the carnage had been instant and total. Damned lucky to be able to move at all, and find an open doorway to another building that still stood ready to shield him from the horror of...
Shivering, Miles shoved the memory away before it really took hold. There were some things it didn't pay to remember. Especially if he was even thinking about plunging into the cold gray concrete depths of an endless stairwell that looked exactly like the endless stairwells in every tall building he'd ever visited. Including...where the fucking hell was the elevator? Turning away from the stairwell that had been placed off-limits by one...only one...of the unconquerable fears he'd had to deal with since the morning the world had nearly ended, he looked up and saw that while he'd been off in the forbidden territories, one of the elevators had finally, through some miracle he probably didn't deserve, risen to twenty-nine. Two floors below.
Knowing it never did one goddamned bit of good to plaster his finger against the still-lit button, knowing from long experience that it wasn't going to make the infernal contraption rise any faster, he did it anyway. Pressed his finger on the button, uttered a quick and succinct cuss word, and continued to press. And press, and press, and press.
About two centuries later, the doors slid open.
Shit.
He'd lost her. He knew he had. And who the hell's fault was that?
He'd let her go. Had actually turned her away, even when she'd made it perfectly obvious that leaving was the last thing she wanted to do. He'd failed to get what he deserved a couple of times in his life, but it looked like this time he was finally going to get exactly what he deserved. Exactly at the time he deserved it.
JoJo was probably on her way to the airport right now.
"Shit!"
When the doors slid open in the lobby, Miles literally exploded out of the cab. Feet barely touching the black marble floor, he launched himself toward the front doors and through them, like some kind of maniac. Hoping against hope she'd still be in the street, still trying to hail a cab or maybe just loitering there, moon-eyed and weeping, like he was the last man on earth and she couldn't bear to leave him. Couldn't bear to live without him.
Which really was the stupidest thing he'd ever dared to think. Just because he'd realized he couldn't live without her, didn't want to live with the empty place in his heart any more, that didn't mean she might actually feel the same. Did it?
"Sir?" The doorman's eyes widened when he burst onto the street and screeched to a stop, turning first one way and then the other. Frantically. Searching. For the familiar, slender form of the only woman who had ever been made expressly and purposefully for him. A woman with a flowing mane of glowing chestnut hair above a blouse the color of fire.
Shit, he didn't even know if she'd be wearing the same blouse now. For all the hell he knew, she could have gone back to her hotel. Could have changed her clothes and packed up her things already. But it didn't matter whether the blouse was red, blue, or some other goddamn color he didn't even know the name of, he would always think of her in red. Would always love her best when she wore red.
Love?
That was the second time he'd had that thought. The second time he'd had to battle it back before it drove him to his knees. As it was, he gasped sharply, as if he'd been shot right straight through the gut. He knew the gasp had been audible when he saw the doorman from the corner of his eye, starting toward him, his expression worried.
Who the living, freaking, hare-brained hell had ever said anything about love, anyway?
Miles didn't know. Didn't have a clue. But whoever it was, he'd like to...
"Sir?" The doorman looked like he wanted to touch Miles's arm. He even moved like he was going to, then quickly pulled his hand back before it had advanced more than an inch or two, clearly reluctant. Clearly alarmed.
As well he should be. Miles knew he must look like a madman. He knew he must be acting like one, and no doubt breathing like one, too. A madman right on the verge of doing some desperate, incomprehensible thing the press would be talking about for weeks. Something the TV reporters would pick up and spread all over the globe before the sun went down tonight.
Carefully, he drew in a breath. He held it for a moment, then released it as slowly as he could, only to immediately replace it with another.
Once the world stopped spinning...or was it only his head that had gone all dizzy and disconnected?...he turned to the doorman. "Where did she go?"
The doorman frowned.
"The woman who was here. The one who called me."
But the man only continued to stare at him as if he'd started to talk in some strange and incomprehensible foreign language. Some wild and demented one, maybe, brought on by his strange anxiety attack in the elevator.
"Where did she go?" And, God in heaven, had she even called him from the lobby? Or had she been somewhere else? Had he only assumed...he couldn't remember. Christ, had she said she was in the fucking lobby, or had she not? Was he making a complete and utter ass of himself right here on the street in front of the doorman and the passersby who had, in the manner of the average New Yorker confronted with a raving lunatic, taken to walking along the very edge of the curb without slowing their speed and without giving any sign they'd noticed anything was amiss even as they watched him from the corners of their eyes?
"I hailed the young woman a cab, Sir." The sound of the doorman's voice, smooth and polished as it shed its momentary alarm and returned to its usual professional friendliness, helped to snap Miles out of his panic. A little.
"A cab?" When the doorman backed off a step, Miles knew he hadn't completely shed the madman image. So he took another deep breath and held it, just like before. Wasting more precious seconds. Feeling them tick away as if the Clock Of Death had once again appeared above his head and was marking down the Time To The End.
When he released the breath this time, he felt calmer. More in control. Almost in control. "I've got to find her," he declared, grabbing a bill at random from his pocket, hoping it would grease his way. "Did she happen to say where she was going? Did she..."
"I heard her tell the driver to take her to Chinatown, Sir. She didn't give an address."
"Chinatown!" Relief washed over Miles. As sweet and pure as the waves at the seashore in Connecticut, where he had a little house and where he liked to go when the city turned too goddamned hot, too goddamned crowded, or just plain too goddamned nuts, it nearly swamped him.
He thought maybe it was time for a quick trip to the shore right now. Just as soon as he...
"Would you like me to get you a cab, Sir? Would you like me to..."
"Thanks." Only vaguely recognizing that it was a fifty, he pressed the bill into the astonished doorman's hand, and was back inside the building. Running across smooth-polished black marble like the madman he was rapidly becoming, he dashed straight to the stairway this time, dashed into it before fear had a chance to take over.
The hell with fear. And the hell with elevators. No doubt the infernal, evil things had all taken themselves off to the fortieth floor, anyway, and decided to hang around there for a while just to get his goat.
His parking space was two floors down. This time it would be faster to walk. Without worry of shin splints or any other goddamned thing that might want to pop up and keep him from finding her now that he knew exactly where to find her.
Address or no, he knew it as well as if she'd stood right next to him and screamed it into his ear.
She was going back to the place where it had all started. She was going back to that alley where she'd appeared as if out of a magic haze to confound his life and scramble his brains. He had no real idea why she would go back or what she hoped to gain by going. But he knew she had.
Tires squealed as the Hummer shot into the street, narrowly missing a passing cab. The driver flipped him the bird...this one appeared to be All-American and fully in command of all the subtleties of the language, both spoken and unspoken, as he leaned from his window and shouted a few observations about Miles's parentage and his character.
Ignoring him, Miles shot into the gap between a Mercedes and a double-decker tour bus, earning himself more gestures of recognition from both drivers, and tore off down Seventh Avenue in search of her.
Luckily, luck was with him. Luck like he'd never had before. Even though it was Wednesday and still early, still the time of day when the streets should have been jammed with pedestrians and motorists harboring death-wishes, with taxis and buses and lunatics, the street was nearly empty.
Luckily, he hadn't killed himself. Not yet, anyway.
He had no idea what he was going to say to JoJo when he got to Chinatown. If he even found her, which, now that he'd reached the street and started the actual pursuit, didn't seem too likely. For all he knew, she'd decided to go shopping and wouldn't be anywhere near that cursed, blighted alley.
But she said she was going home today.
For all he knew, she'd liked that average tea and those so-so sweet buns at the crummy little tea shop so much that she'd decided she'd never be able to live with herself if she didn't have another helping.
She said she was going home to Cleveland, or Baltimore, or...where the hell did she say she was from?
This was a wild goose chase. He knew it. Still, his heart beating out the weirdest and most desperate rhythm of his entire life, his palms so sweaty they slid and slipped and almost couldn't grasp the steering wheel, he rounded the last corner into Canal street. Practically standing the heavy damned Hummer on one wheel the way it shouldn't be able to stand, he automatically began to scan the crowd.
Shit. The street was packed. Okay, it was a sunny day in August, but where the hell had all the tourists come from? Why the hell couldn't they just go back home, and...why the hell couldn't they infest someplace else, someplace he didn't need to be so urgently? Better yet, why the hell couldn't they just stay at their hotels, lounging around rooftop pools and sucking down martinis until they were too shit-faced plastered to think about infesting any place at all?
There! His heart surged when he saw a young woman, brown of hair and red of blouse, weaving her way through the crowds. He slammed on the brakes. Earned a long and loud honk from the driver behind him. He almost leaned out of the vehicle screaming her name, but then the woman turned.
It wasn't JoJo. This one was too old. Too thin, once he took a really, really good look at her. And suddenly, diabolically, everyone on the street seemed to be wearing red.
This was no good. Miles slid the Hummer into a parking spot right behind the Chevy that was vacating it, and then he took to foot. This was no good at all. He should be looking for an alley. That alley. But...
Had the alley been on Canal Street? Or had it been on Mott? He shook his head.
"Excuse me..." he took a step toward the vendor at the nearest shop.
Instantly, the small oriental man broke into an enormous smile. "You like earring?" he asked, holding out a tray.
"No." Impatient, Miles shoved the tray away. "I'm looking for a woman."
"Don't sell woman here." Losing interest, the proprietor turned away, scanning the crowd for his next potential customer.
"No, no." Miles stepped in front of the man. "I'm looking for an old woman. She..."
"Lots of old women in Chinatown." Dodging around him, the vendor waved his tray at a passing group of women dressed like the ultimate tourists in muu-muus and Hawaiian shirts, cameras draped around their necks and white sun-cream spread liberally on prominent noses. "Nice jewelry!" he coaxed. "All kinds of earring. Fourteen-carat..."
"This old woman was in an alley," Miles persisted, following the man. "Right near here. She was selling...I think she was selling...some kind of potions." For a fraction of a second, Miles searched his memory, trying to come up with what, exactly, JoJo had said in those first confused, sexually-charged seconds after their first meeting. "Or maybe it was charms."
"Lots of charm in Chinatown."
"Could you just wait a minute?" The man was already pursuing another group of tourists, a family this time. And that forced Miles to pursue him. "Could you just tell me...I'm looking for an old woman who sells charms. She..."
"You want charm?" The vendor dropped his tray on top of a display of embroidered satin slippers in every color of the rainbow. "Lots of charm!" Reaching out, he caught at a hanging row of cheap things...green plastic circles that vaguely resembled jade, sewn together in slightly uneven patterns, bright with too-red tassels. "Very lucky for you!" he crowed, holding one of them out.
"No. Not like this. These were..." Pausing, Miles wondered if he was about to place himself on that lunatic fringe again. "God help me. I think these might have been some kind of...love charms."
"Love charm?" For a minute the vendor stood stock-still. He seemed to be thinking. Then he slapped his thigh with the hand that held the good-luck charm, red tassels flapping, and broke into laughter. "That a good one, Mister! Love charm!" With that, he went back into his shop. Miles heard the laughter fade away toward the back, and he cringed a little.
In another minute the whole damned family would be spilling out from their merchandise-crammed back room to get a look at the sucker who was looking for old ladies selling love charms. And why not? After all, the idea was completely ridiculous.
Then Miles saw it. Right across the street.
The alley...JoJo's alley. Or he thought it was the alley. It looked like the alley, but...turning around in the middle of the sidewalk, spinning a complete circle, he scanned the businesses surrounding him.
The problem was, they all looked the same.
Here and there a jewelry store intruded, but for the most part they all sported bins of embroidered slippers on the sidewalk just outside the door. They all had racks of ties featuring garish designs. They all had swaying clusters of paper lanterns, all had rows of polyester 'silk' women's' or children's' blouses strung on lines so they swayed and glittered in every passing breeze.
At last he turned back to the alley. Crossing the street, he dodged traffic as he headed straight for it.
It was an unappetizing place. Dark...black, actually...with years of grime and soot. Blocked in places by piles of cardboard refuse and the occasional greasy dumpster, it was also empty of life. Empty of human life, he amended as a green-eyed cat appeared to glare at him from the depths of a hidden doorway. Unless...
Ridiculous! Turning quickly again, he hurried on up the street looking for more alleyways.
In another minute, he really was going to be making a complete idiot of himself. In another minute he was going to be stopping people at random on the street, tourists and locals alike, demanding information about old women in alleys who had the power to change themselves into green-eyed cats at will.
In another minute, if he wasn't really, really careful, he was going to find himself in the back of a police car or an ambulance, on his way to Bellevue for a little desperately-needed psychiatric evaluation.
JoJo's head had begun to hurt. Or was it really her heart that hurt, and had the ache only transferred itself to her head because a headache seemed so infinitely much safer than a heartache?
Standing on the street, staring into the depths of the alley she'd visited only yesterday, she strongly suspected both her head and her heart were hurting.
No one was here. No old woman at a dingy, dented metal folding table with a collection of dingy and unappetizing trinkets spread out before her. Dingy and unappetizing except for that one singing, gleaming bit of jade that had shown so brightly green even in the black gloom of the garbage-strewn alley. But the alley was empty now. Desolate. Dark, dreary, and a little frightening.
Shoulders sagging, JoJo turned into the street almost blindly.
No one here could help her, she thought and looked around.
A young girl sitting at the doorway of the shop next to the alley caught her eye and smiled a little, shyly. She wasn't any more than thirteen, and she looked friendly.
"Do you know an old woman?" JoJo asked, stepping up to her. "She sells things in this alley sometimes?"
"No...I..." Clearly, the girl didn't speak much English.
"An old woman," JoJo repeated, resisting temptation when it urged her to raise her voice and shout, as if the girl was hearing-impaired rather than language-impaired. "She had charms. In the alley."
"Charms?" The girl's smile changed to a frown. "No charms, lady. No woman. Not this alley."
But it was the right alley. Turning to look back, JoJo was sure of it. She remembered the doorway at the far end, almost lost in the gloom. She remembered the board nailed across it, a sheet of plywood to hold it shut. She remembered the hearts crudely spray-painted in a row along the board. Three of them. One red, one purple, one green.
This was the alley, all right.
But had she really expected the old woman to be here? Waiting for her?
The 'love charm' lay like a heavy lump between her breasts, large and unwieldy, oddly cold now despite the anxious warmth of JoJo's body and a similar sultriness in the air. Oddly cold, oddly dead, and no longer very attractive.
JoJo's shoulders sagged. Turning toward the shop where the girl sat keeping guard over the exotic wares spread across the sidewalk, she moved blindly. Not really aware of what she was doing or where she was going, she moved into the shop. Numb and aching, wondering why her magical charm had failed her...why it had brought her such moments of incredible happiness that had made her actually believe for a while in its power, only to let her down so terribly in the light of morning...she picked things up and put few of them down.
She bought slippers in red, and another pair in gold. She bought a beaded change purse shaped like a strawberry, a set of tiny paper lanterns in different shapes and colors to hang on her Christmas tree, some sandalwood incense, and a miniature plaster Statue Of Liberty. And though she'd probably never in her life wear them, she bought three narrow-skirted Chinese-brocade dresses in shades of brilliant red, shocking pink, and hottest turquoise.
She bought because she didn't know what else to do. Because 'shopping therapy' had always been her mother's cure for any kind of trouble, and because it gave her something to do. Something to think about other than the enormously incomprehensible loss she'd suffered when Miles Ashton had turned her away.
When she left the store, she veered left. Still not knowing where she was going or what she was going to do once she got there, she thought she'd give the alley one more chance. Check one more time to see if the old woman had somehow, miraculously reappeared.
Head down, her enormous plastic bag with the trademark 'I love New York' heart emblazoned on the side, she stepped toward the alley and collided with someone. Collided head-on, with enough force to send the bag from her hand and knock the wind out of her lungs. Startled, she tilted her head back and saw, through a sea of stars and sizzling Chinese fireworks...
"JoJo. Thank God I found you. I..." He put his hands on her shoulders and literally held her on her feet.
"Miles? What are you..."
Letting her go with one hand, he scooped her bag off the sidewalk with the other before someone could step on it. And once he'd retrieved it, he didn't give it back to her. He tucked it under his arm and returned his hand to her shoulder.
"I must have been nuts," he said. "No, I know I was nuts. To think I could ever..."
"What are you doing here?"
He glanced around. "The doorman told me you were coming here. He said you'd told the cabbie..."
"But what are you doing here?"
Turning her around, he tucked one of her arms under his and began to walk. "What time is your flight?"
"Three-twenty, but..."
"Newark or JFK?"
"JFK." She tried to stop, but he wouldn't let her. He kept urging her on, irresistibly. "Miles, you aren't answering any of my questions. What are you doing here? Why did you follow me?"
He glanced at his watch. "I'm afraid you've missed that flight."
"I know." At last, managing to overcome his strength, she freed herself from his grip and held out her hand. "Give me my package."
He ignored her. "Most people aren't so cavalier about making their flights. What with the cost of airline tickets these days..."
"It was a frequent flyer. Free. On my mother's account. Miles, will you please tell me what you're doing?" She continued to hold her hand out, demanding he turn over the shopping bag he'd apparently decided to hold hostage. Not that it contained anything that was terribly valuable to her...anything that wouldn't bring groans of resignation from her mother if she ever found the time to look at the things JoJo had bought.
No, it was the principle of the thing.
The bag was hers. She'd paid for those things, and she wanted them back. Now. But Miles only stood there, directly in front of her as mute and as dumb as a statue. A big, enormous, inconvenient statue that was earning plenty of scowls and muttered comments from the throngs trying to pass him...them...on the jammed and narrow sidewalk. "I couldn't," he finally said.
She squinted up at him. "Couldn't what?"
"Let you go."
"So you just chased down here willy-nilly, thinking you could stop me."
His smile was faint, and faintly embarrassed. "My doorman will probably never completely trust my sanity again. Not that he ever really did in the first place."
"But that's why you did come down here?"
Chewing on his lip, looking ready to hug her. To kiss her, or drop to the ground and worship her feet if that was what it took to get her approval, he nodded.
JoJo felt the most enormous weight slip off her shoulders. She felt a new lightness, a new surge of swift and humming energy. Only this time it came not from the pendant around her neck...that was still lifeless, still cold...but from somewhere inside her. Somewhere deep, deep inside, where she'd never expected to feel such a strange and exciting, such a perfect shimmer of sound.
When she'd been apart from him, even for just a couple of hours and only half the length of Manhattan, she'd been desolate. Empty. As lifeless as the slab of rock around her neck. That was the real reason she'd deliberately set about missing her flight home to Erie. And now that he was here, now that he was taking her arm and escorting her down the street again, taking charge of her...well, it was a little bit like the old song said.
Whenever Miles Ashton touched her, she got good vibrations. Really, really fantastic vibrations.
"Where are you taking me?" she asked, tilting her head back so she could see his face.
How had she ever thought she was going to live without that face? Without the strong, firm lines of it, and the calm, darker-than-dark eyes that seemed to see right through her?
"We need to talk." Rounding a corner, he kept right on moving, past shop after shop and alley after alley, deftly dodging cellar doors that stood wide open, their steeply-pitched narrow stairs a death trap for anyone unwary or unlucky enough to stumble into them.
"Miles, isn't this where we began?"
"Yes, it is. And I have a couple of questions for you. A couple of questions I mean to have answered."
"Questions? What kind of ..."
"Just wait," he declared, and wouldn't say anything else, wouldn't speak even in response to her own repeated questions, until they'd reached a small park...more of a concrete square beneath enormous old trees, a run-down pavilion fenced off at one side...and he'd settled her onto a bench in the opposite corner.
"You said you had questions," she began again, tentatively, for at least the dozenth time.
"I do." He fixed her with a look. A hard, grim, no-nonsense, will-accept-no-nonsense one.
"Like?"
"Like...what did you give me yesterday?"
"What did I give you?" Mystified, JoJo shook her head.
"Don't play innocent with me. You know exactly what I'm talking about. What kind of drug did you give me, and how the hell did you manage to give it to me?"
She almost laughed. But seeing the look on his face, she decided against it. This was not the time for laughter. This was the time for some serious, honest answers.
God help her.
"I didn't give you anything, Miles. For God's sake, where would I get drugs?"
He glanced around at old people resting in the midday shade, at not-so-old people feeding the pigeons or engaging in spirited conversation, at a group of teenagers playing basketball beneath a netless hoop. "Anywhere," he answered evenly. "Everywhere."
"Do you know how ridiculous that sounds?"
He looked at her again. "Convince me."
"Do I look like the drugs type to you?"
"No," he replied slowly. "But, then, I don't know that there's any specific way a 'drugs type' would look."
"Then how can I convince you? What do you want me to do? Roll up my sleeves, and..." She started to reach for a cuff, but he put out a hand and stopped her.
"Look me in the eyes, JoJo. Look straight into my eyes and tell me you did not slip me any kind of drugs yesterday."
She did. Meeting his gaze without flinching, without hesitating or stammering or stumbling over a single word, she repeated his words back to him.
For a minute, his gaze searched her eyes. Then he relaxed visibly, sinking back into the park bench, his hands folded on top of his head, his face mirroring a look of very real relief. "I knew you didn't," he murmured, almost to himself.
No reply seemed needed, and JoJo offered none.
"So, then," he said after a quiet moment. "What the hell happened to me? What the hell happened to us?"
Sighing a little, JoJo grasped the red braid strung through her pendant and pulled it out of her blouse. "I bought...well, actually I didn't buy, because the old woman wouldn't take any money for it...Miles, an old woman gave this to me yesterday. In an alley. In that alley where we met."
He barely glanced at the pendant. "I saw that thing yesterday. It's God-awful ugly. I wondered why you were wearing it, but I figured..."
Glancing down at the slice of rock in her hand, she shuddered again. It really was ugly. There was very little green left in it now. It had turned to a mottled gray speckled with uneven flecks of black, and the surface...once so smooth and shiny...felt pitted, uneven, slightly greasy. "It wasn't this ugly yesterday," she said in a tone that even to herself sounded like mystified awe. "Yesterday it was beautiful. It was the loveliest pale-green that seemed almost to shimmer in that alley."
Miles looked skeptical. "Now who's being ridiculous?"
Glancing at the pendant one last time, shuddering again at the sight of it, JoJo dropped it back into her shirt. "I know it sounds ridiculous. But I'm telling you the truth. I was walking by that alley..."
"Where we met."
She nodded. "And this woman called out to me. She motioned to me to come into the alley, and I..."
"You went?" Unclasping his hands, Miles lowered his arms and sat up straight. He sat away from the back of the bench. "Do you know how dangerous that is, JoJo? Even in a crowded place like Chinatown? Especially in a crowded place like this? That little old lady could have been a decoy. You could have been mugged, or...or..."
"I know." Suddenly cold, she shivered. "I thought of that at the time, too. But I saw that this woman was selling things. Some kind of pendants, or some..."
"In a dark alley? That makes no sense!"
"I'm trying to tell you what happened, Miles. Now, dammit, are you going to listen to me, or aren't you?"
"Fine." He sat back, holding his hands up, palms out in a placating gesture.
"She had a whole table of pendants, and all of them were ugly. So hideous I couldn't bear even to look at them. But this one..." JoJo made a quick motion toward the stone hidden between her breasts.
"That one looks pretty damned hideous, too, if you ask me."
She smiled. A little. Sadly. "I know. It's hideous to me now, too. But I swear yesterday it was beautiful. Gorgeous. It was as green as..." She stopped, at a loss for words. "It shimmered. It sang to me..."
"Sang?" He looked more skeptical than ever.
She nodded again. "That's exactly what it did. From the moment I saw it the pendant sang to me. That's why I went into the alley. And when I picked it up..." Her shiver as she remembered the instant when her fingertips had first brushed the bit of jade, the almost-electrical shock of recognition that had sizzled from it into her, was one of sheer wonder and delight. "I asked the old woman how much she wanted, and she said it wasn't for sale."
"Yet you obviously bought it."
JoJo shook her head. "I wanted to, but she wouldn't take any money. She said the pendant was meant for me. She said it was a gift, because I was the only one in the universe it would work for."
"Work?" Miles leaned forward a little, elbows on knees, and tried to look straight into JoJo's eyes. She'd turned her head a little, determined not to let him. But of course it didn't work. Of course he caught her chin with his hand, turned her face toward his, and held it there. Held her with the strength and the power of his darker-than-dark gaze. "What the hell is that supposed to mean? Work?"
"It's..." JoJo felt her face color the same hot, uncompromising red as her blouse or the dress in the bag on the bench between them. "The old woman said it was a love charm."
"Love charm?"
To his credit, Miles didn't laugh. He didn't even smile or look like he might be trying not to smile. He didn't even look flabbergasted, as much as he looked like he'd expected her to say something like that.
"She said it was old. Ancient. I didn't believe that, but..."
"But you did believe it was a love charm."
Miserable, she shook her head. Nodded. Shook her head again. "Not until I stepped out of the alley, and there you were."
"What the hell was this so-called love charm supposed to do, anyway?" he demanded, scowling as if he thought she was pulling the biggest scam, the biggest practical joke of all time, on him.
And if she was in his position? If he was sitting there so calmly, telling her such a preposterous tale?
What the hell would she think?
"I was supposed to wear the charm next to my skin. Next to my heart. And never take it off," she said in an unsteady, strangled voice. "It was supposed to take me to the one man in the world who'd been made for me."
Miles's face had colored a strange, not-unattractive red. Had colored the same shade of red that hers felt. "Just like that?" he demanded. "Bam! You put it on, and there's Prince Charming?"
She felt her face darken from red right through crimson all the way to maroon. "The old lady didn't say anything about it working immediately. And you're hardly Prince Charming."
He ignored the retort. "And you expect me to believe this...this...crock of crap?"
JoJo shrugged, and it was her turn to sit back and relax. "I'm telling you what the old lady said. And anyway, are you going to sit there and try to tell me you didn't feel...something...the second we bumped into each other?"
She could see in his expression that he wanted to deny it. That he even thought about denying it. But in the end she also saw that he couldn't.
"I went back to talk to her today," she said softly, sadly. "To ask her about the charm and make sure I'd heard right. But she wasn't there. Not even a trace of her. And no one I asked could remember that she'd ever been there. No one seemed to know what I was talking about."
Very suddenly, without saying another word, Miles grabbed JoJo's hand in one of his, her package in the other, and tugged her to her feet.
"Where to now?" she asked, a little tired of all the constant running back and forth, back and forth, and for what? Love charms?
Ridiculous!
"If I'm the man of your dreams..."
"She didn't say you were the man of my dreams."
He didn't miss a step. "Excuse me?"
"She said you'd be the one man in the world who'd been made for me."
"Same thing."
It wasn't, but she didn't feel like trying to point that out to him. He would believe what he wanted to believe, and nothing she could do or say at this point was going to change that. Besides, she was too breathless to try to argue anything while they were rushing...almost running...through the streets. At least, they were running until he ground to a sudden stop, so abruptly she plowed straight into him, lost her balance, and had to grab hold of him just to keep herself on her feet. "Miles, what the hell..."
"Lucky bamboo," he declared, selecting a celadon-colored pot from a street-vendor's display...a pot that contained a small forest of bamboo stalks, some curled around the others as if to keep them standing upright.
"What the..."
"You have your charm," he said with a little grimace, handing a ten-dollar bill to the vendor. "I think it's only fair I should have mine."
"But...bamboo?"
"Are you honestly going to tell me you think I'm stupid for believing bamboo could be lucky, JoJo? When you believe in love charms?" He couldn't take her arm now that both his hands were full. Still, even so, she had no choice but to follow when he turned and walked away again, a little more slowly now.
He still had her package, after all.
He didn't know what had possessed him. After the crazy tale JoJo had told...about love charms, for God's sake!...he should have been furious. A week ago, three days ago, he would have been furious that she'd wasted his time with tall tales. He'd probably have wanted nothing more than to be rid of her and never see her again. He'd have no doubt felt disgusted that she'd obviously taken him for a fool and done her damndest to play him for one. But now...
Well, somewhere over chicken piccata, or maybe it had been sometime during the tomato gazpacho, Miles had realized he couldn't be angry with her...didn't want to be angry.
Sometime during dinner he'd felt the heat start to build again, low and tight in his groin.
Heat. In his balls.
And that couldn't be good. Wasn't good.
Looking at her now, walking beside him through the sweltering darkness of an August heat wave, he wondered exactly how he'd turned into such a fool. Such a sniveling, pussy-whipped fool who kept letting her lead him around by the nose this way, when he'd started to suspect she might be a little crazy. More than a little unbalanced. Maybe even delusional.
Depending upon love charms to capture a man.
Give me a break!
The problem was, she had captured him. Hook, line, and sinker. Without doing one single, solitary thing. Without even lifting a finger. All he'd had to do was look at her, and zing! There he went. Out of control. Out of his mind, for no good reason.
JoJo didn't look like a lunatic, either, though he felt sure there was no more 'lunatic look' than there was a 'drugs-type look'. He'd be willing to bet a year's income on the estate his dad had left him that lunatics came in all shapes, all sizes, all varieties. But JoJo...
Sighing quietly to himself, he eyed her appreciatively. If this was the shape of a lunatic, then hooray for lunatics! She'd changed into an outfit she'd bought in Chinatown. Something she'd pulled from her shopping bag as casually as if she'd lived her entire life out of plastic 'I love New York' bags. She'd poured herself into it...into a shimmering, shining column of brilliant greenish-blue with a little standup collar and Chinese-style gold cord fastenings at the front. And slits.
God in heaven, one look at the slits in that slender, form-fitting dress...slits that extended all the way to her thighs and revealed acres and acres of smooth, bare leg above a pair of elegant little golden slippers he supposed she'd found in Chinatown, too...and he'd been a goner. He'd taken one look at her in that getup, his cock had literally roared to life, and it hadn't settled down since.
He'd suffered one hellacious evening of agony back there in the restaurant, complete with champagne that hadn't done one single, damned thing except magnify his problem by causing his cock to swell to truly monumental proportions.
He'd actually had to hide behind JoJo just to get out of the restaurant without humiliating himself completely. But now that they were in darkness, now that they strolled along beneath a moonlit and star-drizzled sky where nobody could see him clearly and nobody was looking at him anyway...
God, he just wished he could figure out what had hit him.
Love charm? Maybe. Hardly.
Creeping lunacy? If he had to bet, he'd put his money on that one. On all the stress, the guilt, the irrational fears the shrink had warned him were going to creep up on him one of these old days and snap his mind like a rotten pretzel if he didn't face up to...didn't come to terms with...what had happened the last day he'd ever gone to work.
"Oh, Miles!" Mercifully, JoJo's cry of delight dragged him up out of that pit of despair before he had a chance to sink too far in. "I've always wanted to!"
Dragged so abruptly up and out of his brush with self-loathing, he could only stand there for a second, open-mouthed like some kind of goddamned imbecile, his mind whirling, the gears refusing to mesh as he tried to figure out what the devil had made her grab at his arm and squeeze it so hard he wondered if she might not be trying to break it like a rotten pretzel.
"At least," she went on, bending around to look up at him with shining eyes, her chest rising and falling in excitement beneath the snug top of her gleaming dress. "I've wanted to ever since I arrived last week."
He looked where she was pointing. And at last it made sense.
It was a horse and carriage. One of the line-up along the curb, all decked out and waiting to take the suckers...tourists...for 'romantic' rides around the city and through Central Park.
"I never had time," she murmured. "The convention kept me so busy...too busy. And anyway, there was no one I wanted to share..."
And how the hell was he supposed to resist that wistfulness in her voice? The sudden widening of eyes that turned all misty?
"Would you like to?" he asked, stifling a little bit of a groan when he saw the way her eyes shone when she turned them to him.
"Could we?"
God, her eyes were like stars. They were brighter than stars. Bright enough to put any one of the stars glittering in the sky above the park at this very moment completely to shame.
Forget about the wistfulness. How the hell was he supposed to resist eyes like those?
He waited while the coachman helped her up into the carriage. It was a white one with slippery lavender upholstery and some fairly unrealistic-looking sprays of lavender plastic roses in vases at either side. But the minute Miles hopped up next to her, he decided this might not have been such a bad idea after all. He'd always thought it was kind of corny. The kind of thing he'd never in a million years want to do, so he never had. Of course he hadn't counted on JoJo snuggling up next to him despite the warmth of the night, so close he actually thought he felt her heart pounding out excited, and exciting, rhythms that urged him to...
Acting entirely on impulse...the same impulse that had landed him in this unexpectedly promising situation to begin with...Miles dug in his pocket, found several bills, and leaned forward to wave the cash in front of the driver. "Keep driving," he ordered. "Until I tell you to stop."
Wordless, never looking around, the man took the bills, shoved them into his pocket, and kept driving at a slow, steady pace, through the tree-shaded lanes of the park.
"Now, then." Laughing softly, deep in his throat, Miles slipped his arm around JoJo's shoulders, tightened it, and turned toward her as he pulled her closer to him. "What I have in mind is this..."
"Too much talk," she declared, catching his chin in her hand and pressing her mouth against his.
Maybe it was the champagne...he'd consumed a good quantity of the stuff, after all. Or maybe it was the warmth of the night, combined with the fat, round moon, just beyond full, that hung like one of Chinatown's paper lanterns in a velvet-black sky. But whatever it was, it lit off skyrockets inside his head. Red, and blue, and green skyrockets that fizzed to life with explosions of light brighter than any neon he'd ever seen...brighter, even, than Times Square on a rowdy night. They went off, one after another as her lips wandered across his and gently, insistently parted his, fizzling as skyrockets always did, only to immediately be replaced by a fresh crop of even larger, even brighter, starbursts of color beneath the lids of his closed and dazzled eyes.
Gently, she pried his lips apart, and his hands tightened to fists in his lap. God, her mouth was soft. Incredibly soft, as it brushed his from the left to the right and then back again. Incredibly soft, as it explored. Diabolically soft, as she inserted her tongue all the way between his lips that had started to quiver in the strangest way. Demonically soft as she ran it back and forth, just barely inside and still exploring. Soft even when, at length, she found what she'd been seeking, and seized upon it with a tiny laugh that exactly matched the one he felt rising in his own throat.
Close already, Miles pulled her still closer. Pulled her all the way into the circle of his arms so he could wrap them tighter around her. So he could hold her as if she'd just suddenly, inexplicably, become as important as life itself to him...as important as the shimmering, perfumed air he breathed, or the deep and steady beats of his heart pumping blood to every part of his body. As important as food, or water, or a safe place to lie down at night.
Murmuring something wordless, something no doubt mindless and passion-driven, her lips never leaving his for even a second, JoJo pressed the full, rounded and curved length of her body to his. Half-turned in the seat now, one leg hooked up beneath her so that the slit in her skirt revealed far, far more of her than he was ready to see, she pressed her chest to his and pushed him backward. Pushed him off-balance so he could no longer be the aggressor, all the while making it clear without uttering a single word that she was here to take. And take, and take, and take. Whatever he had to give.
He almost screamed when his cock jerked. When it leaped to ravenous life that made the hard-on at dinner look like a pre-pubescent boy's very first try. When it tried to escape and grab hold of what it would have before the night was out. He might have screamed if JoJo's mouth hadn't been fastened tightly over his.
She was on her knees now next to him. She'd pulled the front part of her dress up, so that it lay in soft and shimmery folds between them, and she'd pressed the back of her hand to his cheek, holding him where he was. Holding him so he couldn't escape.
As if he would ever consider trying to escape!
She'd positioned herself so perfectly. With one hand occupied at the side of his face, she'd propped the other loosely on her hip to hold the smooth and silken fabric of her dress, encouraging it to ride up degree by slow degree over the bare flesh beneath...did she encourage it to ride up? Or was that just an accident? Just a lucky twist of fate?
Miles swallowed another groan, this one deeper, more meaningful, more desperate.
He knew she wore nothing at all under that dress. She'd confessed it to him, blushing, just before they'd left his apartment. She'd worn the same clothes for two days, she'd said, and they weren't fit to be worn for a night out on the town. So she'd put on what she had, and only what she had. And did he think it would be okay? Would be appropriate?
Oh, Christ. He thought so.
He could feel the heat simmering up from the soft, soft and delectable flesh that lay so close to him and hidden by nothing but a smooth layer of China silk that had already slipped out of position, almost revealing...
Slowly, as the fabric rose around her hips and her mouth continued to make its deep and succulent forays into his, Miles reached up. Beneath the tempting slit in that smooth layer of satin that was the only thing separating them. He slipped his hand up into the even smoother, even slipperier and firmer layer of woman beneath. One prowling finger found and then barely grazed softer-than-soft flesh that seemed to quiver and tremble as his fingertip barely, barely made its way inside.
"Mmmmmmm," she purred into his mouth. "Mmmmm-hmmmmm."
He'd wanted to conquer. Wanted the touch to dominate her, and make her surrender. Make her come apart at the seams as he slowly, carefully, began to graze his fingertips across the sweetness he found between her legs.
But the touch had the opposite effect. Entirely opposite. For in the next second, moistening around the finger that first probed gently, then slipped easily and firmly all the way into her tight opening, JoJo conquered him.
Conquered him and held him prisoner with her soft warmth, her moist and greedy lips, her delicious fire that had long ago replaced skyrockets with bursts of glistening, captivating fire that lit the entire world and scorched it bare before fizzling out in a long series of falling, orange embers. She replaced skyrockets with a pure and burning, addicted need that emanated from the center of Miles's heart and the center of his soul, not to mention his very aroused and exceedingly agonized groin.
His cock had begun to ache. Had begun, literally, to try to tear its way out of his pants. But for the moment he ignored it. Told it to shut up, behave, and he would get to it later. Would get to it just as soon as he'd finished with her. As soon as he'd readied her.
For right now, this was about her. Had to be about her.
Using his free hand, he caught the back of her head. Cupped it. And then it was his turn to press his mouth against hers, so tightly she'd never be able to leave, not even to come up for breath. Not even for an instant.
Slowly, he swirled his tongue inside the one part of her and his finger inside the other, tasting her and treating himself to her. He plunged repeatedly, only to be met by counter-plunges of her soft and flicking tongue and jerking twists of her body that seemed to want to encourage and entice him at the same time that they strove only to inhibit.
Jesus. He couldn't figure her out.
Still couldn't understand...not really...the hot and demanding attraction that refused to let them part. That held them together, mouth to mouth, body to body, as if they'd somehow been melded into a single being by some cosmic blowtorch that had ensured they would never again be separated. He didn't understand it. But he'd come to accept it. And with acceptance...
"Miles." JoJo breathed out his name on a sigh. A long and wistful one that barely required separating her mouth from his.
"What?" His cock still grumbled uneasily. JoJo still held the side of his face with her one hand, her fingers splayed wide across his cheek, just as she'd splayed her legs wider, too. Had sunk down onto the fingers he'd slipped inside her so that he could exert a pressure that would tell her as words never could that he didn't want her to leave. Not tonight, and not ever. That he would forbid her to leave if she tried. Moving his free hand up under her dress, he cupped her lovely, firm, bare ass and gained a firmer hold.
His fingers brushed superheated flesh between her legs again, and then they found their way deeper. Much, much deeper, all the way into the enticing, darker, and more secret regions that lay at the very center of her.
"Miles!" JoJo's breasts rose and fell, round and erect and entirely unreachable beneath the fitted, clinging top of her gown. Releasing his mouth at last, she breathed his name into his ear, her tone scandalized. "The driver!"
"What about him?" Turning his head, he breathed his question into her ear and felt his cock soar to a whole new level, a whole other unexpected peak of delirium, when his lips brushed the firm, cool whorls of cartilage and skin.
"He...you know..." She laughed. Softly. Huskily. And that was Miles's undoing.
Without thinking, without hesitating, he shoved his exploring fingers upward with a quick, hard thrust. Shoved them all the way into her, buried them inside her, all the while marveling at the way her elastic warmth expanded, just the way it would when the time came to welcome his cock.
She encompassed his fingers now so easily. So willingly.
So eagerly.
JoJo stiffened a little, gasping softly again, right into his ear, and then she relaxed. Lowering her body a little, sliding her knees apart still more so that he would have even better entry, she looked down at the hand hidden beneath the fold of her gown, watching with wide and enormous eyes the penetration she couldn't possibly see. "Miles," she breathed again, his name a sibilant hiss that vaporized instantly, completely, in the star-speckled summer-night air.
"Dear God," he murmured, adjusting his angle so that he could reach her most hidden, most sensitive places. Finding the tight and needful bud that lay buried so deep within her, so secure and sheltered in its solitude, he stroked and heard her gasp. Petted, and heard her groan. Caressed, running just the tip of a finger across that one spot, and felt a shiver dart the length of his spine to match the whole series of shivers that for some time now had been throwing a race along hers. Her hands grasped his shoulders and clung tight as she struggled to keep her balance. So tight he'd no doubt find neatly-spaced little rows of fingerprints bruised into his flesh in the morning.
"What are you doing?" Her whisper made scarcely a sound.
"What does it feel like I'm doing?" He held his hand very still and held her motionless, too, pressing her ass tightly with his other hand so that she couldn't sway, couldn't swing her hips, couldn't possibly move in any way against the pressure he held at the inside of her. He held her in a way that made it utterly impossible for her to find any relief from the mounting tension he could feel strumming through every part of her body.
"I can't believe you're...right here, with all these people..." She cast a glance around, wide-eyed. Wild-eyed.
They were passing through a quiet and deserted section of park, dappled with shadows and lighted only by an occasional streetlamp and the blue-white sheen of the no-longer-quite-full moon aided by a faint and misty glow of stars. Ahead of them, he heard the echo of another carriage, another horse's footsteps. And behind them still another. But for the moment, neither was in sight. No one was in sight.
"No one's here," he murmured, flicking his fingers the tiniest bit.
It was just a flick. But it elicited a long, low moan from her. One she concealed by pressing the back of her hand tight against her mouth.
"Do you want me to stop?"
Another flick. Another moan.
"I'll stop if you tell me to, Jo."
Flick.
"All you have to do is say the word, and..."
"Don't..." she moaned into the hand that held all sound in. "Don't...you dare..."
"You sure?" This time he gave more than a flick. He pulled his hand back just slightly, retreating a very little before he pushed his fingers back into her. Before he stroked that waiting and quivering nub again, just once.
Just once, but it was enough to make her respond. Enough to make her turn wet, enough to make her already-tight passage tighten even more. Enough to send a shudder all through her body, making her tremble and shake in the circle of his arm.
"I'll take that as a 'no'," he chuckled, then pulled his hand back slowly. So slowly that at times it seemed barely to move, seemed to linger infinitely against the smooth, gliding moisture that filled her. But it did move. All the way back. All the way to her entrance.
Turning her head, her eyes nothing more than deep, wide pools of darkness in the moonlit, starlit night, she made a sound. A soft, needy, mewling sound deep inside her chest.
"More?" he asked, his hand still again, with only the tiniest bit of fingertip still inside her, just barely separating the folds of her flesh.
"Yessssss!"
"You sure?"
She tried to buck then. Tried to force her hips downward, tried to force them to move in any way that would make him enter on her terms rather than his. She was quick. But he was quicker.
He tightened his grip on her ass. Held it firmly, so she couldn't succeed.
"Please?" she whimpered, and he felt the agony of her arousal, of her need, rolling off her in waves.
But he stayed as he was. Held her as she was, unmoving. Delighted in the moment and the eager body that was his now, however he wanted it and whenever he wanted it. "I just want to be sure," he murmured.
"Yes. Just. Please..."
Laughing softly, he decided to make her wait another second or maybe another minute. Decided to see what she would do if he continued to deny what she so obviously, desperately wanted. "Because I'd never want to force anyone to..."
Head lolling backward loosely, her body sagging against the hand that supported her and held her upright, JoJo cried out. It was half a scream, there and yet not really there. Loud enough to fill the carriage, but not loud enough to carry much farther. It was a sound filled with longing, and aching, and pleading. An explicitly, unmistakably, remarkably sexual sound.
"Jeeee-zus," the driver murmured, but didn't turn. Didn't make any kind of motion.
"See?" Miles laughed into her ear. "Now the driver knows what you're doing. Now he knows what you're..."
"What...I'm...doing?" Her words continued to come in short, staccato gasps as she tried in vain to plunge herself onto the finger that remained barely inside her. "What the...hell...Miles, I'm not doing...anything. You're the one..."
He laughed. Shoved. Pushed suddenly, abruptly, with all the strength in his arm, until his knuckles met the outside of her and his fingertip once again found the nub that had grown hotter, wetter, more swollen since his last visit.
JoJo shuddered, and so did he. She gasped, his cock gave a massive, out-of-control leap of sheer, animal fury, and he retreated from her. But this time it wasn't to linger or to hesitate.
This time he shoved his fingers into her again immediately, plunging as deep as he could so he could slide them back and forth, around and around, his own need beginning slowly, inexorably to explode as she flexed and swayed with each little movement, each little caressing change in pressure. He marveled again at the taut elasticity that allowed her flesh to retreat back into place the instant the pressure he exerted changed or shifted. He marveled at the way she clung to him, and on that thought, his cock declared it wasn't going to remain quiet or docile a second longer. With a sharp and stabbing surge that nearly goaded him to cry out as JoJo had, it swelled more. Too long ignored and too long denied, it became demanding, wanting to know when it would have its turn. When it would...
JoJo's hand found it. Came to rest with unerring instinct directly on top of the straining ridge, and cupped it gently with fingers that insinuated themselves as far around it as a couple of layers of fabric would allow. Her fingers tightened when he thrust instinctively, shoving himself into the touch. They tightened when he moved his fingers inside her and loosened when he began the withdrawal that elicited more soft and mewling sounds from her.
Shivering, shuddering, Miles pressed his mouth to hers and drank her in with one long and sweet draught, as his mind spun slowly, slowly, out of control.
JoJo had never known a sweeter night. A more deliriously spectacular one than this, in an inner-city woodland that smelled soft and ripe with growing things, that smelled green and fresh and faintly...only very faintly, very intoxicating faintly, of distant flowers. A night that sweltered beneath a sky studded with stars and a moon so silver-bright it lit the spaces between concealing tree-shadows with a blue glow almost of dawn.
But was it really the night that sweltered?
Or was it her, ice-cold yet every bit as sultry as the air around her, beneath the weight of Miles's kiss and his other...attentions?
She had her answer before she'd barely thought the question.
It wasn't the night. Wasn't her, either.
It was them. They worked together to make this shimmering, encompassing heat. Though she wasn't sure if the thanks should go to the love charm she still wore because she'd been afraid to take it off, or to something else. Some purely chemical reaction between them that would have set them off at their first meeting whether she'd worn the blasted, silly thing or not. Still, even with the charm gone stone-cold and uglier than anything she'd ever laid eyes on, she worried that taking it off might precipitate some horrible disaster. She worried she might end up chasing Miles away the way she usually did the men who entered her life, just when she'd started to realize she needed him in a way she'd never needed any of those inconsequential others.
Needed him, dear God, because no one else could ever...no one else had ever come close to satisfying the most secret yearnings of her soul. So she'd continued to wear the charm.
His mouth hadn't left hers for more than a second or two since the first, almost nonexistent brush of his lips, when he'd claimed her. And his hand...sweet saints alive, she didn't even want to think about the places his hand had strayed since the kiss had begun...the intoxicating, unfathomable places it had begun to explore or the intoxicating and unfathomable results of that exploration!
Despite the cover of darkness that wrapped itself around her, and him, and the carriage, like a moonlight-silvered velvet cloud, she felt herself beginning to blush at the same time she felt herself beginning to respond, sighing into the softness of the mouth that surrounded hers and covered it. Groaning a little at the pleasure he'd made so familiar, so sweet and longed-for in the extremely short time they'd known each other, she swayed, her body moving in time with the motion of the carriage as she tried to adjust her position on the probing finger he held so deep inside her. Trying to urge it to even greater explorations, and even greater daring.
"What is it?" he asked, moving his mouth away from hers by no more than a millimeter. Two, at most. "Am I hurting you? Would you rather I..." His hand stopped what it had been doing...stopped the slow and torturous invasion that hadn't yet driven her to the brink of collapse, but that showed enormous promise. So far, he'd done little more than tantalize her with visions of other things, more explicit acts they couldn't possibly perform here, but which would have to come as a matter of course. Which would have to come soon, or maybe sooner than soon.
Or could they perform them here? That seemed unlikely. Still, the notion that Miles might try was enough to give her pause...significant, suggestive, thoroughly enervating and all too alluring pause.
In another minute she'd be asking him to...then, to her complete horror, he began to pull his hand away. Began to back out of her just when his fingers had found the one absolutely right and absolutely essential place inside her. Just when they'd begun to stroke in the most satisfying way that promised to make every one of his unspoken promises come true.
"No!" She said it much more loudly than she'd intended. So loudly the driver jerked a little, as if he'd been struck. "Don't stop!" she urged a little more quietly and reached up beneath the parted flaps of her brocade dress to grab Miles's wrist and press his hand back where it belonged. Back against the needful flesh between her thighs, the fingers once again inside her as far as they could go.
Miles chuckled very softly. "I thought you were enjoying it," he murmured, his lips very close to hers again, still touching just barely enough to blaze a continuing trail of utter delight against hers with every movement. A scintillating suggestion of touch, it did more than any outright kiss could to ignite the first, deep-red shimmer of flame inside her. "You're wet, sweet JoJo. So incredibly wet, and so..."
JoJo shuddered again as a fresh burst of that very moisture rolled through her, cooling immediately when it reached his hand and trickled across, onto thighs that had begun to shake dangerously, no longer with the motion of the carriage, but against it. She was wet, all right. More wet than she'd ever dreamed she could be. So wet she supposed her dress would be ruined by the time they were finished. Crumpled, rumpled, and stained beyond repair. But did she really care?
The answer was...had to be...a resounding 'no!'.
What the devil was a dress in the larger scheme of things, anyway? What the holy hell did a dress matter, when her first, her sweetest, dream had just come true? When Miles Ashton had given her the carriage ride for which she'd longed all of the past week, looking down from her room in the hotel next to the park and watched them loading and unloading, rolling sedately along behind teams...beautiful teams...of perfectly-matched horses.
She'd been so certain this was one dream that couldn't come true. But it had. It was. And there was the other ride, too. The one to which Miles was treating her right now. Right in this star-dazzled, moonstruck, rapturous moment she prayed, like she'd never prayed for anything in a life that hadn't featured all that much prayer to begin with, would never have to end. This incomparable, never-in-her-wildest-dreams-imagined ride on the probing and stroking hand of the one man. The perfect man. The one who'd reputedly been made for her, and only for her.
It was something of a shock to realize, in the moment when rivulets of moisture streamed in earnest from her clenching, quivering body, when Miles thrust his fingers even deeper to work more diligently and more delightfully at the secret spot he'd found inside her, that she really believed it. Really believed what the old woman had said.
Jade over heart, Lady. Work for you. Bring you perfect man.
She really and truly did believe with all her heart. She believed so strongly and so implicitly that her lungs tried to seize in her chest making all sound impossible, even the soft whistle of a delighted breath.
Unaware of her inner turmoil, or maybe very aware and enjoying every scintillating, shivering instant of it, Miles had pressed his lips to her ear again. He was whispering low and delicious things that scarcely made sense, yet were going to push her straight over the edge into unimagined territories if he didn't quit, and quit soon. If he didn't...
"Don't quit," she whispered, catching his head in her arms and holding it to her. Bending over him, as if she meant to shelter him from any prying eye that might try to see what he was doing and try to scold him for it.
Sheltering him, period.
"Is this what you dreamed?" he whispered, his mouth moist with silken fire against her ear. "When you looked at the carriages and the couples. Was this what you...?"
"N...no." Her answer was murmured only with terrible difficulty through teeth clenched against the explosion of sound that had built inside her, as close to the breaking point as all the rest of her.
"No?" Sounding vaguely amused yet definitely disappointed, Miles moved his lips away. Started to move his hand away again, and might have succeeded if she hadn't been quicker. If she hadn't caught his wrist and with near-maniacal strength, shoved his fingers deeper than they'd ever gone before. As deep as they could possibly go.
"Not in my....wild...est...my God, Miles, don't stop. Don't ever..."
Laughing again in that way he had, that thoroughly incendiary, utterly intoxicating and enticing way, he didn't.
How could she have possibly dreamed a moment like this, she wondered with the last small, astonished fraction of sanity he'd left to her. How could she possibly, when she hadn't even known a man could do this to a woman with the touch of a hand? Hadn't known he could take her dreams so far beyond the first, wicked moment when it had looked like he'd filled them completely with just a single stroke? When he'd opened all kinds of possibilities of new worlds filled with new and even more incredible dreams with the single brush of a hot and relentless mouth against hers? When he'd awakened dreams that hadn't ever before existed, even in her fevered and sometimes insanely overactive imagination?
Dreams that hadn't had a chance to exist until she'd had enough of novelists and crowds, of the endless competition to be noticed, and the realization that her one book, the one she'd started seriously to suspect might be her only book, wasn't ever going to be the rousing success she'd hoped. Dreams that hadn't had any chance at all until she'd wandered away from her convention in disgust, answering some inexplicable call that she go shopping in Chinatown.
And wasn't she glad she had answered?
Sighing again, no louder than before, she moved her hips. A very little, to settle herself more firmly atop the fingers that, mercifully, had stayed right where she wanted them...far, far inside the waiting, pleading wetness of her. Fingers that showed no sign of wanting to retreat. "Don't stop," she breathed again.
"Tell me how it feels," he urged, his mouth moving from her ear to her lips momentarily, and then back to her ear to take up the same incendiary, inciting stroking and nipping at the lobe. "Tell me what you feel, JoJo. Everything you feel."
"You?" she murmured, half-questioning since she didn't know what he wanted to hear. "Penetrating me? Inside me?"
"Not good enough. Too clinical. Too cold. Tell me how you feel."
"How I feel."
Laughter again, very soft. Very tantalizing. "That's right. Tell me what goes through your mind when I do this." He moved his hand. Twirled his fingers and made fresh, blistering contact with that spot he'd touched before. The one that when aroused as he was arousing now, had the power to weaken JoJo's legs and every other muscle in her body. To make her heart twist inside her chest, seeking for the space it needed to expand as she imagined all the other innermost and hidden parts of her body were expanding. A spot that had the power to chase all conscious and coherent thought from her mind. To make her see little swirls and whirls of colored light, almost like a child's wildly-electrified pinwheel catching the moonlight. Whenever Miles stroked. Wherever he stroked.
His fingers delved again. Deeper. Bending and flexing, they alternated their divine pressure from one side of the sensitive, hidden kernel to the other. And all the while Miles breathed calmly, as if nothing was amiss. All the while he laughed softly, as if he knew she was in terminal distress and needed to scream. As if he was daring her to scream.
"Tell me what you feel," he said again. "Tell me what you think."
There was no way JoJo could do anything of the kind. Speech, just like that scream she wanted so desperately to release before her poor, strained heart exploded inside her chest, was out of the question.
Her breath was gone again. Really gone this time with no hope she'd ever get it back. Her body had stiffened, and suddenly, without warning, Miles reached with his unoccupied arm to catch her legs just beneath the knees and swing them around. To swing her around, so she lay sideways on the seat with her backside pressed up tight against the outside of his hard and muscular thigh and her legs, still spread and now shaking as if the sultry night had frozen solid in the blink of an eye, slanted up across his thighs. Spread wide...spread immodestly and heedlessly wide...in the open carriage.
Brushing the flesh between her legs with his knuckles as he maneuvered his hand around, adjusting it until his fingers once again located and settled into the deepest, most sensitized reaches of her, he stroked. "There, now," he declared, no longer seeming aware or to care that a stranger sat a few feet away and might be...very probably was...listening to every bit of what they were doing. "Isn't this better?"
Still unable to speak, JoJo sighed.
It was so much better. Was...heavenly. Miles had, with just a few flicks of his wrist and a few flexes of his very talented fingers, turned this extraordinary night beneath the stars in this one-of-a-kind urban park into something that went so far beyond extraordinary that she could barely summon words to describe it, even in the stunned privacy of her own thoughts.
He had turned this park into a garden of supernatural delight. Into a Garden of Eden.
His fingers withdrew, slowly again, and then they plunged, several of them together and acting as one. JoJo braced her feet against the seat on the other side of his legs. Her body tingling with the beginnings of release, she felt every muscle tighten. Felt her back lift away from the seat so that only her shoulders and a small bit of her behind and her heels supported her. Spreadeagled, her head tilted back so far that she saw nothing now but the sideways curve of the satin-upholstered seat, she managed to inflate her lungs enough to draw in one long and shattered breath. Thinking for a second she really would cry out this time because to not cry out was impossible, she gritted her teeth. But the exhalation, when it came, was nothing more than a small and whimpered breath.
"Relax." Miles dragged his fingers back again. He pulled them out of her slowly, slowly, in preparation for yet another plunge, yet another stroke that must surely, surely be the final one. Because it must surely devastate her. Demonic and possessed, those fingers slowly opened just inside her, stretching her flesh wide and then still wider. Then they closed again and went in search of her trembling nub first from one angle, then from another and another and another. Until he ran out of angles and attacked her from all the angles at once.
JoJo tried to relax. God, how she tried! But her body was tuned as tightly as a guitar string. Opened wide for him, as wide as it could, it refused to do anything now but tense itself more and more, in preparation for the end that only seemed to grow farther away with every new and unabashed invasion he launched. Eyes open, too dazzled to see and yet seeing everything with a new and crystalline perception that both astonished and amazed, she stared up at ever-changing patterns of heavy-leafed branches that first blocked all sight of moon and stars and afforded the deepest and sweetest of shadows only to reveal her again a moment later, with all their molten-silver light. Moon and stars seemed to hover immediately above her, scant inches from her eyes, well within reach of grasping fingers, should she ever again possess the strength to grasp.
JoJo lay very still as Miles held her, one arm pressed down across her splayed thighs to hold them in place, and the other hand still working, still determined to open her up and ease her every...
"Stars," she said. The word came out slurred and indistinct as the ceaseless, endless stroking wafted fresh currents of debilitating heat through her.
"What?" He leaned forward a little so he could hear.
"Stars. You asked what I..."
"Feel, JoJo." He applied the soft stroking again. Diligently this time, so that a fresh burst of moisture...a prelude, now?...flowed easily, so hot in its readiness that it must scorch the flesh from his fingers and send a lazy column of steam spiraling up toward the moon-bright sky.
Except that she saw no steam. Saw nothing at all for a moment, as the current of energy left her eyes half-blinded and barely able to see anything in darkness that seemed to sweep in all around her, to engulf her, and...
"But that is what I feel," she slurred, her voice completely languid, and as sultry as the darkness that seemed to press down on her. Along with the moisture he'd called up from within came droplets and rivulets of sweat that began to trickle down beneath breasts confined beneath the too-tight, high-necked bodice of her dress. "I feel...stars. Bursting. Inside."
She'd rip the dress open if she could. If she possessed the strength or the will. She'd just grab its sadistically-tight collar with its small, golden Chinese-knot buttons and tear the fabric away. Tear it right down the front so she could breathe, her body could breathe in the sweet night air, and she could...
She'd rip it open and expose herself completely to him. Make herself completely available, so he could take the next step. So he could remove the fingers that only half-satisfied and complete what he'd started. So he could screw her in the back of this carriage. Open those conservative and extremely well-tailored gray slacks and free himself so he could immediately imprison himself again, where he belonged. Inside her.
She needed release. Needed it now. But the motions of his hands, the continued aggravation of actions that promised without delivering, that enticed without completing, showed no sign of allowing it. She wanted him to screw her, and screw her, and screw her. As much as, she sensed, he wanted the very same thing.
"If only..." Somehow, struggling to push with arms that had gone numb and unresponsive, JoJo managed to maneuver herself upright...half upright...on the carriage seat. Far enough that she could whisper to him, and feel certain he would be able to hear the whisper.
"If only what?" His face loomed very close to hers, an unreadable mask, a hidden entity in the darkness that now seemed to have taken a diabolical twist, that now seemed only to want to separate them and destroy their intimacy rather than enfold them and bring them together.
"Miles?"
"What?"
"If only we could..."
He laughed softly, and she knew she'd said enough. She knew he understood, knew he felt the same.
Feebly groping, her hand found what it sought. Found the rigid shaft concealed by gray slacks. The hard, tight, throbbing and shuddering length that suggested he, like her, had come terrifyingly close to the limit of human endurance. Had about passed the point where he would tolerate any more teasing, any more arousal without achieving immediate, spontaneous and certain-to-be-ruinous-to-anything-in-his-path results. In response, as if to confirm her belief, his explorations of her body grew more urgent and much more deliberate though less controlled. More determined, yet less steady. His hands shook now. And that gave the penetration an all-new element. An unpredictability she found... illuminating. Infuriating. Intoxicating. All at the same time.
Because it wasn't enough. Wasn't close to enough.
Could anything ever be enough to ease the smoldering, hurting and spiraling need he'd set up inside her? To be held, and petted? To be entered, the way a woman just naturally wants a man to enter her?
"Miles." JoJo felt her body tighten around him. Felt every muscle tie itself into a hard and quivering knot, felt herself begin to quake violently, deep down inside, as the end approached. "I don't think...I can..." Pressing her hand to her mouth, she bit down hard as a shimmering and swirling wave of purest starlight encompassed by blackest darkness rolled through her. As the orgasm began and rumbled on and on, a violent and spinning, conscious being that knew no end because it had had no beginning.
Biting down harder, she smothered a scream that would have awakened every shadow, for sure. That would have bolted the horse and led them all, including the hapless driver, to a completely different kind of doom.
She felt Miles surge beneath her hand that was now too weak to grasp but could feel all too well, all too clearly, the mounting heat and urgency between his legs.
She heard him swear softly, explicitly, and then heard, as if it was a part of some far-off, never-to-be-completed dream, his terse instructions to the driver telling him the ride was over and to take them back to the starting point.
Take them back quickly.
Take them back now.
He wasn't going to make it.
Was. Not.
He'd had some stupid pipe-dream that when the carriage dropped them off in front of Tavern On The Green, in the same place from which they'd started about a billion and a half eons ago, he'd hustle JoJo into the waiting Hummer and whisk her back to his apartment.
But that was all it had been. A pipe-dream. A very, very ill-planned and ill-fated one. Because his body just wasn't going to cooperate the way it should. That became apparent even before the carriage pulled to a stop at the curb and they tumbled out, a reckless and seething jumble of arms and legs, the driver shaking his head at the antics he'd been forced...okay, paid...to ignore.
Miles wasn't going to be able to wait. And neither, obviously, was JoJo.
She stood on the curb after the carriage had rolled away and just looked at him. Stared with enormous, wide and desperate eyes that pleaded with him to put her out of the agony that was clearly going to consume her long before they reached the Hummer, much less the apartment.
Consume her just like it was for damned sure going to consume him if he didn't do something about it, and do that something fast.
"Damn." Looking around in search of an avenue...any avenue...of escape, Miles spied a small thicket of trees.
It wasn't exactly the best place, wasn't exactly the most secure or un-public of places. But...
What the hell, anyway? Did he think the carriage had been?
Grasping her arm with a hand so sweaty and unsteady it barely managed to grip at all, he tugged her, pleading softly in her distress, toward them.
"Miles?" Her voice was all raspy. Her voice was shivery and shaky, and so subdued he could barely hear it through the insistent banshee-whine of need that filled his ears and must surely, honest-to-God rip the entire top of his head off in another second or two. "Miles, where are you taking..."
Somehow, they made it to the shelter of the grove.
Somehow, they managed to lose themselves between closely-spaced trunks beneath the deepest, midnight-black shadows cast by tightly-interwoven branches.
Somehow, he managed to keep breathing long enough to...
Backing JoJo against a tree trunk...against the largest of the eleven or twelve that gave them sanctuary, he reached for the skirt of her dress. Found the edges of the floating panels at either side of the deep slits...wonderful, beautiful slits that extended all the way up to her thighs...and lifted the smooth fabric up, away from the satin-velvet delights that lay beneath.
"My God, Miles!" He heard her whisper, but only dimly. The noise inside his head, that wail of passionate fury, had grown stronger and more pervasive. It had grown even more deranged, and far more demanding. Pressing his body up tight against hers, he pinned the partially-exposed lower half of her tight against the sloping tree trunk, laying her back so that her weight rested on its firm bulk and his weight rested lightly, firmly atop hers. "Shouldn't we at least go to the car? So we can have a little..."
"There's no time." Reaching for his fly, Miles struggled with his zipper, wondering who the hell had ever invented such a diabolical thing and when this particular one had transformed itself into such a sadistic and mean-spirited device of torture that refused to budge even though it knew...had to know, all too well, the kind of pain he was suffering. Clumsy-fingered, he tugged. Pulled. Felt a sob well up inside his tight and constricted throat. Felt it escape with a soft and mournful sound, only to be followed by another and, hard on its heels, still another.
He was going to die in a minute. Was literally going to keel over on the spot to be found dead in the morning by some unsuspecting grounds keeper. So his obituary could appear in the Times...Man dies in Central Park after penis explodes: Woman accomplice sought.
His laugh, for he did laugh aloud, sounded truly hysterical. Downright unhinged.
"Miles?" Hands reaching to help him, JoJo sounded concerned. More than concerned, she sounded terrified.
As well she should.
All they needed now was one of New York City's finest, one wandering beat cop, to show up in a place where he shouldn't be showing up at a time when he shouldn't be showing up, and it would all be over. They'd be separated, for sure. Separated and sent away for a long, long, long time. And Miles doubted all the pleas of insanity in the world would be enough to get them off.
She had both hands at his crotch, and they were shaking. Not as badly as his shook, not so badly that she wasn't able to grasp the tab on his zipper...when the hell had they started to make the damned things so tiny, anyway? But there her dexterity seemed to fail. She struggled with the damned thing just as he had, and for a second he considered telling her to just leave him the hell alone and not get his hopes up.
He was actually ready to say it when she managed to grip the damned thing and pull it down. She was able to open his fly, and...
Oh, Christ! She went a hell of a lot farther than that.
Miles's breath stuck in his throat as sharp-edged and killing as a sword-swallower's tool of the trade gone horrendously awry.
Her hand just kept on working, fumbling to release him into night air that, warm as it was, struck his overheated cock with an icy stroke that should have shriveled it to nothing.
That would shrivel it soon if he didn't get the cursed thing warm. If he didn't find it a place to...
Once again, JoJo didn't wait for him. Once again, she took the initiative, pulling his body toward hers. Pulling him so close that the tip of him...and only the very tip...brushed lightly, scaldingly at the enticing, dark and moist triangle between her legs. Still barely breathing, he thought he would suffocate for sure when she caught him in her hand and maneuvered him into position. Maneuvered him and then took him in so quickly he didn't know what had hit him, except that the shock of his entry left him dazed. Reeling, as if he'd just taken a gunshot to the head or, more appropriately, a gunshot to the privates.
"God, JoJo." Once again he glanced around in search of certain discovery in shadowed darkness that couldn't conceal them forever.
A few hundred yards away that might as well have been a million miles, or even a billion, lights from the Tavern sparkled intermittently through their thick shield of greenery. Over there people came and went in couples or groups. He could hear their laughter, faint and drifting snatches of it as they walked or maybe just lingered, intent on their own purposes and unaware of what transpired...what was about to transpire...such a short distance away. Faint snatches of conversation reached him as well, for the most part unintelligible except for an occasional word or two that stood out, more audible than the others. But for all that activity, no one moved toward the thicket. No one seemed particularly interested in or concerned about anything beyond the bright circle of light in which they existed.
Not for the first time in the last twenty-four hours, it occurred to Miles that he was having an uncommon streak of luck. A really, really phenomenal one, when all things were considered. Parking spaces, in New York City where there were never any parking spaces, had begun to materialize like magic, at exactly the moments and in the places where he needed or wanted them. Doormen and carriage drivers seemed eager to take whatever bribes he offered, no matter the amount and no matter the reason. And now this.
Where the hell was a cop when you least needed one, anyway? he mused, bewildered and a little amused.
Thankfully, nowhere close by.
Because JoJo had his attention. All his attention, for as long as she cared to claim it.
She'd started to move. She'd had to practically levitate just to place him inside her in the first place, and now she had scooted herself up along the conveniently slanted tree...another weird stroke of luck?...and was hanging on for dear life as she thrust and retreated, onto him and then off again, repeatedly. Determinedly.
Quickly, before she could lose her balance or her grip, Miles caught her hips. Steadying her even as he shoved himself closer to her and farther into her, he shuddered a little and groaned. "Name of God, Jo."
She seemed to have lost her mind. Seemed to have lost all reason or sensibility as she used her hands to lift herself up along the tree that was her only means of support and then allow herself to slide back, her feet no longer touching the uneven ground, her legs bent and her heels braced tight against the trunk.
He was glad to help her. Glad to add his strength to hers, to aid in the sinuous rhythms of the lithe and agile body moving against him. More than glad to help her stroke herself along him in smooth and gliding strokes that must, that surely did, strike sparks that would illuminate even the parts of the night where the glow of that enormously brilliant moon didn't penetrate.
Beneath him, she groaned. It was a low sound. A soft one, that translated instantly into a sweet vibration he felt in the part of her body that had joined itself so irrevocably to his. More than a vibration, it was some kind of pulse. Of energy that reached out for him from the inside of her, that slipped through his mind and his body and his cock like some kind of low-volume earthquake. Like the temblors they had out in California, where the earth...as he understood it...never completely stood still.
Well, hell. Those tremors couldn't compare to the one that was shaking Central Park right now. This monster had to be registering on Richter scales all over the country. All over the world. It was that intense. That jolting.
Rolling his head to the side a little, Miles caught sight of the restaurant and was astonished to find everything as it should be...as it had always been. No windows had shattered beneath that deep rumbling of the earth's crust. No new and sharp-angled mountains of earth had risen, shattering pavement and ripping great, gaping holes in its surface. No one at the Tavern was running. No one was screaming. No one was doing anything, except for a couple climbing into a white carriage with white horses, not unlike the one he and JoJo had so recently vacated. Or maybe it was the same one. He'd never know, because JoJo made another sound.
This time it was a little 'huffing' noise. A kind of voiceless 'chuff' of labored breath she seemed to have difficulty forcing out. She'd started to moisten again, the way she had in the carriage. Only she was moistening more. She was pulling him in, her body straining to have him and capture him, to steal away his freedom and the last little bit of his mind with muscles that contracted around him in slow waves as she enticed him onward and inward to what must certainly be, what could only be, his doom.
"Christ." Gritting his teeth, he waited for the earth to settle.
But it never did.
JoJo was ready for him. More than ready. Hands gripping his shoulders now to support herself, she couldn't believe how ready she was. Couldn't believe the leverage her position gave her and how easy it had become for her to impale herself upon him and then release herself. How easy it had become for her to do all the things to him that previously, in her hesitation and her uncertainly, she'd thought only men had the freedom or the strength to do.
Miles had begun to shake in the most peculiar way.
Too breathless, her lungs too tight and tense to make speech possible until after, if after ever came, she could only look her question at him. Could only gaze at him with concern in her eyes, and hope he'd be able to see through the cloaking darkness, hope he would take notice and say something to reassure. Something to ease her fears.
But he didn't see. The night was too thick beneath the trees, and too impenetrable. His eyes appeared to her to be no more than great, black blotches in the scarcely-visible pale blur of his face. There was no way to tell if they were open or closed, though the sudden conviction rose in her that they were shut tightly. That he'd shut off all outside input so he could devote himself completely to the continued swaying and quivering of their joined bodies because it was good.
God, was it good. More than good. It was...
"J...JoJo?"
"Wha..." It was all she could say. Somehow, simple as it was, her mouth and throat no longer possessed the ability to form even that bit of sound. Her tongue had lost all power to twist itself into the positions needed to finish the word. And then it didn't matter. Because in the next second her tongue lost all power to do anything other than entertain Miles's as his mouth closed over hers.
Leaning forward, he pressed her tighter against the tree trunk, his position changing, as did the way in which his shaft penetrated her. It went deeper now, and his full weight came down on top of her. She...they...lay an odd and uncomfortable angle. At least, it should have been uncomfortable, and precarious, to say the least. Only it wasn't. Held firmly by strong and steady hands that guided her motions, sometimes controlling them and sometimes allowing them free and uninhibited rein, gripping with her feet in their soft slippers and her hands, she felt oddly secure. Felt like the only, the last, secure and immovable object in a world that had suddenly gone stark, raving stir-crazy.
Miles gave her another ten seconds of freedom to maneuver herself as she wanted. Maybe twenty seconds before he took charge again. Took control.
She could feel him building inside her. Could feel the urgent heat, the increasing need and the sudden rock-solid determination to meet that need and subdue it by satisfying it. As she gasped, he became harder inside her. Became so much larger, and so infinitely much more dangerous.
Shivering, she lifted her legs slowly, one at a time, not sure her balance would hold as each heel left the solidity of the tree trunk and each leg wrapped itself around his waist, seeking new ways to wrest control from him and draw the ball back into her own court.
Of course it couldn't be done.
Miles let her cling to him. On some level, groaning with guttural sounds that reverberated through his massive chest and seemed to rock her world even more, he seemed even to encourage it. But that was as far as he was letting her go. Now that he had her, now that the prerogative to advance and retreat was his and his alone, he made it clear with every concussion of his body into and against hers that he meant to keep it that way.
Still...
Acting on instinct and impulse rather than from any clear or conscious thought, JoJo flexed her legs a little, experimenting. Just to see if she could match his rhythm. If she could somehow get herself into sync with it, so she could aid and abet...
Astonishingly, it worked.
One minute, he was controlling her. Then as she flexed, pulling herself roughly onto him at the precise moment when he thrust into her with all the force of his legs and his hips, she felt him falter. Felt him hesitate, and even stagger a little, caught off balance and off guard. For that second, she'd gained the control back again. Then when he withdrew, so did she. Releasing her grip on his waist, she straightened her legs the tiniest, the most insignificant, amount and backed herself off so that in the end they clung to each other by the merest thread, the merest whisper of his flesh still parting the throbbing and aching opening to hers.
The next time they came together, in the very next instant, with a mutual, soul-deep groan and a new plunging of tongue against tongue and hips against hips, they were controlling each other. Perfectly in unison, acting almost as one body possessed of two separate and mirror-image brains, neither was in control yet at the same time both were in control.
"Goddamn," pulling his hungry and searching mouth away from hers, Miles gasped for air. "JoJo, this is..."
He never finished, and she found herself supplying adjectives for him.
Incredible? Oh, yes, that would do nicely. For this thing they had achieved, this dark and sultry coupling beneath the leaves and the moon and the far-flung and scattered stars, was indeed incredible
Incendiary? That, too. Already it had occurred to JoJo that enough sparks were flying, enough heat was rising, to ignite the tree that now seemed the only steady thing in this entire stumbling and stuttering world.
Delightful? That only went without saying. For how on all of God's green earth could anything be so incredible and so incendiary without also being absolutely, unquestionably delightful?
This was right.
That one thought came through more strongly. For a moment, remembering the love charm and the way it had seemed to sing to her from the darkness of that Chinatown alleyway, translucent and glowing, JoJo wondered.
She didn't believe in magic. Really didn't. Didn't believe in love charms, either. At least she hadn't believed. Not a week ago, when she'd left Erie, so sure of what she wanted and so eager to attend the convention where she could begin the networking and schmoozing she'd so naively believed would get her to the top of the publishing world. Not even two days ago, when Chinatown was still only an enticing blob of color on the map, when she hadn't had a clue she was about to go there, or that Miles...
"What were you doing there?" she gasped as his body met hers with one final, primal stab and his arms tightened, locking her firmly and inescapably onto the rock-solid and pulsing length of him.
"Doing..." he gasped in reply. "Where?"
"China...town."
"Oh." For a moment he gave no answer. And for that moment, none was expected. Because he had begun to climax, and so had she. Still in perfect unison, each separate half of their united and interconnected bodies seeming to predict what the other was about to do and what the other needed, each half responded perfectly to that need. For that moment, vision clouded even behind closed eyelids, with stars swimming in all-new, all-radiant and inexplicable patterns in a sky that seemed, in her imagination, to have taken on the deep, deep shimmer of a black and iridescent opal, JoJo forget what she'd said. What she'd asked.
She forgot so completely that when Miles spoke, after the last quivering convulsion had faded away, after peace and sanity and order had begun to return to a newly-sizzling and newly-complete world, she was confused.
"I don't know what I was doing," he said. "I just...felt a need to go there."
"At that moment?" Stupid, stunned, her mind refused at first to work.
"At precisely that moment." Miles was still inside her. Although they'd both come with an explosion fit to rock the heavens, he was still holding her aloft, her feet off the ground, her body hopelessly pinned between his fading erection and the tree trunk that had suddenly begun to feel rough and unpleasant beneath her bare and clammy skin. He was fading fast but holding on, JoJo sensed, to what they'd had just moments ago with everything he possessed. Was trying in vain to make it permanent.
"Oh." Gritting her teeth as she began to slide downward, the rough bark abrading arms and legs, no doubt destroying what little must remain of her turquoise brocade dress, JoJo felt her feet touch the ground. Felt her legs refuse to catch, refuse to support her, and felt Miles's hands as they lowered her gently, gently, so that she squatted at the base of the tree, the bunched folds of her dress dropping to cover her steaming wet thighs.
"Where to, lady?"
JoJo stood at the curb in front of her hotel...what had been her hotel, until she'd been forced to give up her room and check out thirty minutes before...and stared down at the Hummer sparkling diamond-blue fire in the Thursday morning sunlight.
Miles smiled up at her, or seemed to be trying to smile as shoved open the door and made a little motion with his head, inviting her to climb inside.
For the first time, JoJo felt a little scared. Up until yesterday, she'd had the companionship and the connection, however humbling and at times humiliating it had been, with the novelists' convention. She'd known she wasn't alone in her purpose. But that was yesterday. Now the novelists had moved on, gone home, and only she was left. Without a room, since the next convention was already checking in. Without an idea where to start looking to find another room.
She was alone in one hellaciously enormous city. Completely on her own, for the very first time in her life. And in the second while she looked down into Miles's smiling face, the only familiar one in all that hellacious enormity, she thought she was about to burst into tears.
Because she knew she was going to have to leave. Because she couldn't stay here alone, didn't have the nerves or the courage for it. Because she just wasn't cut out for anyplace bigger than Erie, Pennsylvania. Anyplace busier, or more vital, or more...damn it, more stimulating.
She was going to go back, probably as soon as she could find an airline office and arrange for the flight to take her back. And the idea was about to kill her. It was about to break her poor, deluded, love-charmed little heart right smack dab in two.
Gripping the steering wheel between white-knuckled hands, no longer looking at her while he waited for her, Miles stared straight ahead. He stared at nothing, stared at sunshine beaming down into the street, sunshine as bright as any she'd ever seen, yet nowhere near bright enough to break up the bleakness gathering inside her soul.
He knew something was up. Had sensed she was about to leave, and it was all he could do to keep his hands from shaking as hard and as violently as all the inside of him was shaking. He was going to lose her, and that was a problem. God, it was a real humdinger, mind-bender of a problem!
He couldn't bear to have her stay. Not another hour, not another minute. Not when she aroused in him all the feelings he'd long since put behind him...all the warmth and dreams that had been ripped away from him once with no warning and wouldn't, goddamn it to hell, wouldn't ever be taken away again. Because he wasn't going to allow himself to dream them ever again. And that was where the problem came in. He had started to dream them, and he didn't want to stop, just like he didn't want JoJo to leave him. He thought he wouldn't be able to bear his life a minute longer if she did leave him.
Angry at his own moon-eyed stupidity and at the way he could just forget, as if none of it had ever happened. As if he'd never lived before he met JoJo, never loved, never lost. As if her presence, her sudden and uninvited intrusion into his life made it somehow right to forget.
Well, he wasn't going to allow it!
JoJo climbed into the passenger's seat of the Hummer, the skirt of her sundress...such a wide and foamy skirt, such an utterly feminine white skirt covered with tiny yellow flowers...swirling around her knees. For a moment, transfixed, he stared at those knees, at the long and lightly-tanned legs below them, pink-tipped toes in white sandals trimmed with little yellow daisies. Then with superhuman effort, and only with superhuman effort, he managed to drag his gaze back to the upper half of her. To her shoulders and her throat, bared by the gathered halter top of the dress.
Christ, the dress was backless, and her shoulders...
Had he ever seen shoulders so firm? So gently perfect, and golden from the sun?
Had his cock ever stood up just this way before? Had it ever shouted 'excuse me' so vociferously he actually glanced over at the hotel doors, at the crowd milling around and the bell captain who was already glowering at him for parking in this spot too long, wondering if they'd heard?
This is romance, he thought with a dull and dazed part of his brain, all the while trying to ignore the dangerous stirrings he felt in his crotch, and elsewhere. He knew it was romance. He'd felt it before, but never in hell expected to feel it again. And the fact that he did...that it had crept up on him when he hadn't been looking, and hit him hard...
He had it, all right. Through no fault of his own, he had the worst case of romantic inclination he imagined any poor slob had ever had. And to his complete and utter astonishment, he didn't want to let it go.
Couldn't let it go.
"That man is snarling at you."
He heard her words very dimly, through his fog of indecision and self-loathing, and his struggle to keep his cock at bay. "What man?"
Lifting one very slender, very delicate and superbly-shaped arm, JoJo pointed at the bell captain, who was not only glaring, but was now advancing toward them, his mouth already open to yell.
Quickly, he wheeled the Hummer out into the street, fitting it neatly between two yellow cabs that wouldn't stand a chance if they ran into him, anyway, and turned. Straight into a one-way street heading the wrong way. "Damn!"
JoJo turned in her seat. Bringing one leg up, folding it to tuck it partially beneath her, she faced him, and with that motion the skirt of her pretty-flowered dress slid up a little to reveal more curved, white thigh than was safe. For either of them.
She'd changed his life, he realized with no small amount of wonderment, gripping the steering wheel even harder. Whether he'd wanted it to be changed or not, whether he'd felt he deserved it to be changed or not, JoJo Hammond had come along with her damned whatchamacallit...that hideous piece of stone she wore around her neck in the belief that what some no-doubt-senile old woman had said would actually lead her to...
"You can't do it," he blurted suddenly, hanging on to the wheel with enough force to crack the plastic, or at the very least bend it hideously out of shape.
"What?" She sounded completely confused, and Miles knew she was looking at him. He could feel her smiling a little bit and frowning just as much, feel the softness and warmth of her gaze on him. But he couldn't make himself look at her in return. Couldn't convince himself it would be wise or even survivable to look at her in return.
If he looked at her, he was going to cry.
Break right down, and...
"You can't go."
"Who said anything about going?"
"You're..." His heart had started to soar again. Really, really soar right up to the Manhattan rooftops. Dangerous, dangerous, dangerous. "...not?"
"Well," She paused. Sighed. Turned her head so that she showed her profile to him. So that she looked back, over the top of the seat. Back to where they'd just been, a wistful and just-slightly-uneasy look flickering across her face. "I have to tell you, I was thinking about it back there. Without a hotel room, it seems kind of...but going back to Erie isn't going to accomplish anything, either. Except get me stuck back into the same old going-nowhere rut of a job I had before."
"You don't have a hotel room?" He couldn't help but glance at her now. "But what about...?"
From the corner of his eye, he saw her shrug. Saw her look at him again. "I had to check out. They needed my room for another convention that's coming in today."
"What about your stuff?" He heard the horror of worry in his own voice, and couldn't believe it. Wasn't he the one who'd been half-seriously thinking only a minute or two ago that he'd be better off if she did go home, and leave him to wallow in his guilt and his misery? Well, the hell with that! "What about your bags?"
"I checked them at the baggage room in the lobby. I don't know what I'm going to do, Miles. I haven't had time to think ahead, so I figured it was someplace to leave them instead of dragging everything around while I..."
Without realizing he'd been going to do it, without touching the brakes or even reducing his speed, he did it. He veered sharply right, wheeling the Hummer around a corner...into another one-way street going the wrong way, goddamn it!
Checking the mirror, he realized his phenomenal luck was still holding. The cops had suddenly, mysteriously decided to remain absent, even though his blatant disregard of the law showed no sign of letting up any time soon.
Maybe that goddamned love charm of hers was really something more like a 'get out of jail free' charm, he thought, but then immediately shook off the idea as he roared around another corner, headed back to the hotel.
In the passenger's seat, JoJo was hanging on for dear life. One hand gripped the headrest, and the other was braced against the dashboard as his NASCAR-style driving all but dumped her right out of the seat and onto the floor. "You ought to fasten your seat belt," he said mildly. "There's a law."
"Where are we going now?" Apparently, she didn't feel safe enough to release either hand. Not until he lowered his speed and took things a little easier.
"Why the hell didn't you tell me that before we left the hotel?"
She looked a little offended. "I really didn't think you'd care."
"Of course I...Jesus God, Woman. That baggage room's going to cost you an arm and a leg."
"Three dollars per bag per day," she replied, "But..."
"Jesus God! Give me your claim checks," he growled, jerking to a stop under the marquee, right in front of the bell captain who seemed none too glad to see them back so soon.
She rooted around in her little yellow straw purse, then handed them over. "Miles, I don't see what all the fuss..."
"I'll only be a minute," he said and left her sitting there, a protest half-formed on her lips. Ignoring the bell captain who'd already started to spool up for a real New York yell, he dashed inside. Luckily, there was no line at the baggage room. Luckily, the attendant was alert and spoke English.
Luckily, JoJo was still sitting where he'd left her, still looking a little dazed and amazed, when he raced back outside, one enormously-heavy and bulging suitcase under each arm and one even-heavier and bulgier one dangling from each hand.
Four bags. For one Christ-almighty week. Tossing them into the back of the Hummer, he thought they had to weigh enough to...
"What the hell do you have in there?" he demanded when he leaped back into the driver's seat. "Gold bricks? Did you rob Fort Fucking Knox or something?"
"Books." That slightly-offended, slightly-wounded, more-than-slightly mystified expression hadn't left either her eyes or her voice.
"Books? What in the..."
"It was a novelists' convention." Turning in her seat so that she faced forward, she groped for her seat belt. "They give away free books. And I..."
"Good God." He muttered it under his breath, though he knew from her expression she'd heard. "Did you ever think of leaving some for somebody else?"
"So now where are you taking me?" He couldn't read her tone at all this time, or her expression. Even if he'd been able to think clearly, or read anything clearly, which he most emphatically was not in any shape to do.
"Wherever you want to go." They'd been heading south, speeding along with no destination in mind. Realizing that at this speed and in this direction they'd be entering some pretty scary and much-better-stayed-the-hell-away-from territory in no time at all, he slowed down even more.
"I should go..."
"But not to the airport," he interjected quickly, anticipating that was what she'd been about to say, and knowing his heart just couldn't stand to hear it.
"My life's not here," she replied, and he heard a soft and wistful note in her voice. Of reluctance, that for the space of a moment had his hopes soaring toward last night's distant, glittering and unreachable stars. That had them spiraling in great upward streams, seeking...
"What kind of life did you have back where you came from?" His voice sounded every bit as empty, every bit as forlorn and reluctant as hers.
"I..." From the corner of his eye, he saw her shrug the way she had before with her face turned away, her lip caught between her teeth.
"That doesn't say much about it," he observed, trying to hide the note of glee that tried to creep into his voice. "If the best you can say about it is 'I'. If you can just miss a flight so deliberately, without even thinking about it."
"I thought about it."
"Not very damned hard!"
She didn't try to argue that. Didn't say another word for quite a while...several blocks, at least. "Life in Erie's not exactly what I've dreamed about," she mourned softly. "But it's all I've got, and I'm afraid it's all I'll ever..."
"Erie?"
"It's where I'm from." Her voice turned gentle and so, when she turned her face back to him, had her smile. "I told you that."
Had she? He couldn't remember. So much of what had happened recently...since he'd had the extremely weird notion to pop on down to Chinatown for no reason at all...was a blur. A blue-tinted haze of delirium, non-stop arousal, and the wildest, most uninhibited activity with this woman who'd definitely, love charm or no, worked some kind of mind-bending and diabolical magic on him. Who'd changed him into someone he'd never been before. Someone he no longer knew or even recognized.
"I thought you might want do a little sightseeing," he said, just to fill the heavy and awkward silence.
"When I don't even have a place to stay tonight?"
She'd have a place to stay. If he had anything to say about it, and he was going to do his damndest to make sure he had plenty, she already had a place to stay. His place. Where she belonged. In his bed, and no place but his bed, though that idea was utterly insane. Completely unthinkable, for a man who'd made that vow to never give his heart to anyone again.
And so on and so on.
So, he'd suffered a loss. A terrible one, a devastating one that had damned near ripped his heart out of his chest while it was still beating and ground it down into the dust that had been a building right up until a few minutes after he'd staggered out of it.
He needed to get over it. Needed to stop for a minute, and consider that he wasn't the only person in the history of the world who'd suffered a loss. By his count, there were several thousand people who'd suffered similar losses in the same few moments he'd been suffering his. And that didn't even take into account all the other losses suffered in all the moments down through time, when...
He needed to get a grip on himself. He needed to start understanding that the world didn't revolve around him. That life and death didn't revolve exclusively around him. That it was time to let go of some of the past. Time to face up to his fears and get on with the future.
That must be the healing the shrink had talked about.
Because suddenly, unaccountably, he felt a lifting. A lightness he hadn't felt in a very, very, incredibly long time in his heart and in his soul.
"Miles?" Reaching out, JoJo touched his arm. "Are you all right?"
"Of course I am." But he still shivered. Still shuddered, hoping against hope it was more than just the electrical touch of that slight brushing of fingertips against his skin that made him feel this way.
"It's just that...you looked so strange, all of a sudden. One second you were talking about sightseeing, and the next...well, it was incredible. Really incredible. You got the strangest expression...a whole string of expressions across your face, and then you...you looked like a goose had walked across your grave, or something."
A goose? He shivered again.
On his grave?
There weren't any geese in Manhattan. Not very many, anyway. It wasn't hospitable territory for geese, any more than it was hospitable for...
And he wasn't in his grave.
There it was, insinuating itself into his mind the way it tended to do sometimes in quiet moments when he was preoccupied or let his guard down too much. The horrible thought, the one that haunted his waking hours nearly as much as the sleeping, the one that...
He wasn't in his grave. Where he should be.
The second half of the thought popped up right on cue, just as he'd known it would. Before he could even think about taking steps to squelch it.
Healing was good. Healing was necessary. But it wasn't going to come all at once, in some gigantic, light-bulb burst of revelation. And that was one more thing he was just going to have to learn to live with.
"There must be some goddamned tourist trap you want to see," he growled, not meaning to sound harsh, but glad the suggestion seemed to divert her from the dangerous path she'd started to take.
"Well..." she glanced around.
"Macy's? Times Square, though it's in the other direction..."
"The one thing I've always wanted to do, but haven't had a chance to...Miles, I'd like to go to the top of the Empire State Building."
Oh, shit.
His stomach turned. Literally twisted itself in half, then tied itself in one big, ugly, heavy-duty knot.
She would. It had been inevitable she would. And he...
"It's a building," he muttered, hoping his sudden queasiness didn't show in his voice, though he felt sure it showed in his expression.
But JoJo wasn't looking. She was gawking, all tourist now, at everything and everybody, damned near falling out through the window on her side of the car in her eagerness to get a gander at it all.
"It's a big building," she corrected. "I've never been to the top of such a big building."
"You go up," he said, fighting the note of terror that tried to creep into his tone. "You come back down. What's the big deal?"
Settling herself back into her seat, JoJo looked at him with earnest, eager and shining eyes. "Maybe it's not a big deal for you. But we don't have buildings like that back in Erie. Buildings that big."
"I can't convince you that Macy's would be the thrill of a lifetime?"
She smothered a smile. "I can't afford thrills like that, Miles. And you did ask what I really wanted to do."
Yes, he had, damn his hide. Hadn't he?
The elevator took off like a rocket.
Rising smoothly, it was still so sudden that JoJo's stomach stayed somewhere behind for a precious few seconds. Inside the crowded cab, tourists gasped a little, eyed each other sheepishly, then begin to murmur and giggle as the ascent continued smooth and fast and uneventful. And she laughed with them. At least she laughed until she realized Miles wasn't.
He smiled a little. He smiled very faintly, and not quite certainly, but his face had turned a shade or two whiter than it should be...than she'd ever seen it. Pressed tightly back into a corner of the crowded elevator cab, he'd squeezed his eyes shut and tightened his hand painfully around hers...almost to the point she worried bones would begin to snap.
"Is something the matter?" JoJo tugged a little on the hand he'd joined with hers.
Opening his eyes, he met her gaze and smiled...tried to smile...a little more broadly. But he still looked...skeptical? Was that the right word?
No. He seemed more transfixed. Anxious. Fearful?
"I knew this was wrong," she muttered, flashing back to the moment on the street below, when they'd first approached the building. She'd been all but twittering with excitement, but the closer they'd come to the entrance the quieter he had become. And then he'd stopped. Just dead-stopped, in the middle of the crowded sidewalk to tilt his head back and stare up for the longest time, gaping as if he'd never seen a building taller than about three stories in his life. He'd had a weird look on his face then. Like he was the most naïve and goofy hick-town tourist who'd ever hit a big city. Of course, she'd looked up, too. It hadn't been possible to not look up, when she really was the goofy tourist.
The Empire State Building was impressive. A towering gray-stone monolith, rock-solid and breathtakingly Art Deco, its summit swimming far, far above in a crystal-blue sky. At the time, she'd thought Miles only meant to point it out to her. Only meant for her to look up, so she could enjoy the awe-inspiring size of the thing.
Now she wasn't so sure.
He hadn't said a word then, and not a word since they'd entered the elevator, either. She'd sensed a certain tension in him, something that came from deep inside, and she could almost see, could definitely feel, the effort it took him to take his next breath.
Then they were at the top.
The elevator doors slid open at the eighty-sixth floor gift shop and observation deck, and his eyes just sort of glazed over. Dragging in another breath, he stayed where he was, allowing the crowd of tourists to leave the elevator ahead of them, and only then, gripping JoJo's aching hand even tighter, did he step out into the short hallway.
"We can go back down," she said when instinct screamed that coming up here hadn't been a good idea. Not a good idea at all.
"Don't be ridiculous." Following along at the rear of the crowd, Miles laughed a little too heartily and not quite steadily, and dragged her to a stop again. "You wanted the top, and here we are." Unable to do anything but stare up into jet-dark eyes that gazed down at her as blank and inscrutable as if he had some great, hideous secret to hide, she saw him swallow hard. "I'm fine. And anyway, it's not fair to you to..."
"Me?" Her voice lifted with an outraged squeak. "How the devil did this get to be about me, when you're obviously..."
"I told you. I'm okay." He took another deep breath, and really did look a little better...a little more stable. "You need a souvenir from the top of the Empire State Building," he declared, pointing her toward the gift shop. "One of those things with the damned monkey hanging on the top of it, maybe."
JoJo went with him only reluctantly, trying to dig in her heels and hold back, and not doing a very good job of it. "They sell the same stuff down on the street," she protested. "All over the place. In every shop."
"It's not the same if you buy it on the ground." He actually managed to laugh this time.
"It isn't?"
"Of course not. You'll always know you bought it in the wrong place." With that, he raised his gaze to the placard displayed prominently in the gift shop. "Eighty-sixth floor," he muttered, more to himself than to her. Seeing telltale ridges of white spring up around his mouth as he clenched his teeth, JoJo shivered a little. He had a look in his eyes. A look of steely determination she'd never seen before. It was the look of a man who shouldn't be crossed and should definitely not be questioned. The look of a man who was hiding something from her, and from the world, and quite possibly even from himself. Especially from himself.
It was all JoJo could do to not back away from him.
Miles Ashton had a secret. This wasn't the first time the thought had popped into her head, but it was for sure the strongest. He had a secret, and instinct spoke again, this time to warn her he wasn't going to volunteer anything. Wasn't going to answer questions, not even if she asked them.
He wasn't going to be okay, either.
"Here." Tugging at her arm again, Miles stepped up to a glass case and pointed to a collection of objects. "How about one of these for a souvenir?"
JoJo looked, then gasped. "Have you lost your mind? Sixty dollars? Can't we just find something with the damned monkey hanging on the building? I'd be perfectly happy with..."
"Ma'am?" He waved a finger at the nearest clerk. "We'll take one of these."
Chewing on her lower lip, JoJo could hardly control her breathing. It had started to come in shallow and uneven little hitches at the very idea of...or was that the touch of his hand, idly stroking her skin where the low bodice of her sundress left it exposed? Was it only...
"Miles!" she hissed, forcing herself back to reality. "Are you crazy? What the devil am I going to do with a Christmas ornament that costs sixty dollars?"
"And one of the Big Apples, too," he declared, ignoring her.
"This is preposterous. You can't be ser..." She did back away this time, alarmed by the sudden flaming of twin spots of color in his still-pale cheeks. "This isn't good, Miles. This is..."
"And wrap up one of the other ones, too. The one with the monkey hanging on the building." He was nearly manic now. If that was the right word for it. The politically correct term. The spots of color had flamed brighter, and his eyes had taken on a gleam...a not-entirely-sane one. "If I want to buy sixty-dollar Christmas ornaments," he hissed back, "then that's what I'll buy. Now, go away and see if there's anything else you want."
She hesitated, wondering what the hell she was supposed to do now. She wasn't going to accept such an exorbitantly-priced gift, of course. Not even if they were the most unspeakably gorgeous Christmas ornaments she'd ever seen. She had no idea what had come over him. Worse yet, she had no idea what to do about it. Other than give him a little space, keep a watchful eye on him, and hope this bizarre fit would pass soon...before he decimated his bank account.
But she did want a souvenir. And maybe a dose of good old-fashioned Pennsylvania common sense was just what they needed here. She chose a pair of ornaments for herself...a miniature Empire State Building and Statue of Liberty that together cost about one-sixth of one of his, a stack of postcards since she'd forgotten her camera again, and of course the building with the giant ape clinging to the top...in this case, a trinket box no higher than her hand.
Miles insisted on paying for it all. Had his credit card out and in the clerk's hands before she could say two words.
"You're really acting strange," she murmured as they turned away from the counter, the bag containing the purchases clutched tight between her hands, since she worried he'd have another attack and crush everything to a too-bright, too-overpriced heap of glittering shards. "I think it's time to go down now."
"Don't be silly." For a second, when he turned to her, JoJo thought he was about to sweep her into one of his long and extraordinary, deeper-than-sin kisses. Instead, he merely bent a little and brushed his lips across hers in a brief, if slightly tremulous touch. One that left her in many ways far more unsteady than if he really had slipped his tongue to her and held it there for an indefinite period of time, right here in public. "You still haven't..." For a minute or two they simply stood there, with groups and pairs of tourists milling around them and past them. And all JoJo could do was wait, her breath constricted, her lungs feeling like they would surely turn themselves inside out if the constriction didn't end, and soon. Wait, and pray, and hope, and...
"Okay." Was that a thread of shakiness she'd heard in his voice? Looking up at him quickly, she couldn't be sure. If it was, it wasn't matched by anything in his expression. "Let's do it."
Somehow, she knew she should let him go first. Let him find his own way, in his own time, across to the windows. Let him stand for a minute or two next to the glass, looking out with a new raising of the hard, white ridges around his mouth. Ridges that could only come from clenching his teeth so hard he'd wear them down to nubs if he kept it up for very long. "Miles?"
Without speaking, without even looking at her in response, he grabbed her arm again and took her outside. Out, onto the high and soaring observation deck at the top of the world. Out, into afternoon sunshine and fresh air, and the stifling heat of a windless afternoon. Out, where she could lift her face to the sky for a moment before, her heart leaping nervously in her throat, she looked across a short distance to the railing...more a chest high extension of solid walls, topped with a heavy mesh cage, that blocked the view directly at their feet.
Breathing deep, Miles stepped behind her and wrapped his arms around her, seeming unwilling to let her move any farther forward. And that was fine with her. Shivering a little, she had no desire, now that she was up here, to look straight down.
"This is it," he said quietly, pulling her around to look north toward Central Park. "This is the top. As high as it gets." He choked a little on the words, biting back a sudden, low sound in the back of his throat as he began to shake. Literally, shake all over with a quivering so deep and so pervasive JoJo suspected it came from deep inside, deep in that same dark and hidden place where she'd sensed he held so much of himself in reserve.
"Miles?"
He didn't answer.
"Are you afraid of heights?"
"Don't be ridiculous," he said in a tone that made her wish, suddenly and devoutly, she'd asked before they'd made the trip to the top. "How the hell can a person live in Manhattan...on the thirty-first floor, no less...and be afraid of heights?"
That's what I'd like to know, she thought, pulling free of his embrace so she could see his face and his eyes again.
His eyes were hard. Flat, and dull, filled with the strangest empty-yet-haunted look she'd ever seen.
The hair on JoJo's arms and at the back of her neck stood straight up. Literally. As if she'd just been exposed to the bitterest, iciest wind from the depths of hell. "What the..." she muttered and, taking another small step backward, gently but firmly put her hand on his arm.
Miles smiled. He tried, but his face was too tight. His mouth jerked and was nothing more than a grim and stretched line in the midst of too-pale skin.
"That's it." Dragging him along behind her this time, she turned toward the door to the gift shop. We're going down. Right this minute."
"No...we're...not." He'd sounded like he was talking through gritted teeth. But when she looked up at him again, she saw only the empty look. The bland expression and the white ridges around his mouth. He stared down at her for a minute. Then another, and another, until she started to feel that time had stood still somehow. That they weren't even here but were someplace else. Some time else.
"You're freaking me out," she said quietly. "I mean, really..."
Miles seemed to shake himself, almost visibly. "Sorry. But you wanted to come up here, and..." He glanced around in that strangely secretive way he'd developed.
"I know. And I really wish I hadn't. If this is going to..."
"Jo."
Nobody had ever called her that before, and she liked it. Really liked it. Ducking her head a little, for just a second or two, she felt herself blush. Felt herself turn the brightest, beetest red. "If you are afraid of heights, this is not the time to be telling me," she insisted. "You should have said something when we were down on the damned ground, before..."
"I live in Manhattan." Saying it again, he sounded like he was trying to laugh and not doing a very good job of it. "How in the hell could I possibly..."
Narrowing her eyes, she stared at him. "I have a friend from school who's deathly afraid of planes," she said quietly. "And she's a flight attendant. Goes absolutely nuts before every flight, but..."
Well, that had been the wrong thing to say.
Very suddenly, he backed against a wall. Quite literally flattened himself against it and was edging toward the door with his eyes downcast, his face devoid of any trace of normal color, devoid even of the burning spots of red that had marked his earlier manic attack...the same manic attack that had somehow, inexplicably, seemed to sustain him right up until now.
"Okay." Grabbing the door, she pulled it open and shoved him inside. "This is getting creepy."
"Listen," he said, catching her arm as she continued to shove him toward the elevators. He'd closed his eyes again and gone sixteen or seventeen shades whiter than he'd been a second ago. But his voice was strong. "I'm okay. Go out on there and have a good look around. I'll wait for you right here." He was talking to her. He was talking at her. But she had the strangest feeling he wasn't talking to her at all, as much as trying not to break down into tears.
"We are going down," she declared, gritting her teeth exactly the way he'd been gritting his since they'd stepped into the first set of elevators, all the way back down there on the ground.
"I guess..." He made another of those strange and gargling little sounds. "Maybe I am a little dizzy."
They'd reached the elevators, and God, were they lucky. There was no line. No wait. The attendant waved them forward. They were almost out. Almost down.
And that was when the trouble really started.
"I can't." The odd, off-balance, shot in the gut, look was back on Miles's face. A look JoJo recognized now. The look of someone who'd been scared half-witless for a very, very long time.
"I need to get you back on solid ground," she replied briskly, trying to urge him forward.
"No." He was too strong for her. Much too strong, and she didn't have a chance. With her still clinging to his arm, being dragged now by him instead of the other way around, he looked around, looked at the attendant. "I've got to walk down."
"I don't think so." The attendant stuck out her chin. She looked at least as determined to make sure he didn't as Miles looked determined to do it.
"Miles?" JoJo tried again to pull him forward and again he resisted. "You can't be serious! You can't actually be thinking of..."
"The elevator's not safe." He had a really wild look in his eyes now. Wilder than wild. The scariest look JoJo had ever seen.
"I beg your pardon?" The attendant looked offended.
But he was shaking his head, harder than before. Backing away. Backing toward the wall again.
Glancing around, JoJo saw that several others, several of the tourists, had stopped to stare, apparently fascinated by what was going on. The elevator attendant had started to back away, too, looking like she thought...and not without good reason...Miles be about to do something drastic. Something that would...this was going to get ugly in a minute. If it wasn't ugly already.
"Miles, you have to..." And then, without thinking twice, JoJo grabbed him. Pressed the heels of her hands tight to the sides of his face, and did the only thing she could to divert his attention. "Get ready to take us down," she told the attendant. Then, wrapping her arms around him, JoJo kissed him.
Miles stiffened beneath the embrace. For a moment she knew he didn't breathe. Then, as if the shock of her mouth meeting his had snapped him out of whatever horrible trance had overcome him and all but overpowered him, she felt his chest begin to move again. The breaths were short, jerky, and unsteady. But they were breaths, all the same, and that was good. That was a start.
Drawing him forward carefully, she coaxed him into the elevator and waved her arm at the astonished attendant, almost groaning with relief when the doors slid closed and the cab began to descend with only the two of them inside.
It took all of three minutes, including a required and somewhat tense, though blessedly uneventful, transfer from one set of elevators to another on an upper floor to reach the ground.
Miles still hadn't regained his color, not completely, by the time they burst from a long and gorgeously marbelled Art Deco hallway into the hot congestion of the street.
"What the hell was that?" she demanded when she finally found enough breath to speak. "Miles, what in God's name..."
Leaning against the base of a streetlight, breathing hard, he shook his head. Sweat poured down his face, and he held up a hand to indicate he wasn't ready to talk.
"You don't look so good." And he didn't. His face was haggard. That was the only word JoJo could think to describe it. His hair seemed suddenly to stand straight out in about a thousand different directions and his hand, when he lifted it to shove the hair back and wipe the sweat from his brow, shook visibly.
"You have got to tell me what happened up there," she insisted. "What the hell were you thinking, letting me take you up, when..."
"Let's go home." He shoved himself away from the pole that looked to be the only thing keeping him on his feet. Gaze riveted firmly on the pavement, he began to walk, very rapidly for someone so obviously and badly shaken, back toward the spot where he'd parked the Hummer.
"Are you sure that's a good idea?" The manic episode, if that was really what it had been, was almost over. He was coming down, fast. Faster than the elevator that had dropped them to the surface in a matter of what had seemed only seconds, but JoJo wasn't convinced. She wasn't ready for what might come next, but something was coming.
Anyone who didn't know him, even as well as JoJo knew him after little more than a day, wouldn't have realized he was still on the verge of panic. But she knew, and she tried to hold him back.
"Where else are we going to go?" he demanded, refusing to be held.
"I just don't...that was awfully strange, and I don't know if it's a good idea for you to be facing any more elevators right now. Or any high buildings."
"That's where I live." He fumbled a little when he tried to fit the key into the Hummer's door lock and stared helplessly when JoJo reached out to pluck them from his hand. "I'm not letting any goddamned...goddamned...they're not chasing me out of my home, Jo. They're not making me afraid to be in my own goddamned home."
"Okay. I have no idea what's happened here. But I do know one thing." JoJo gave him a little shove, urging him into the passenger's seat. "You are not going to drive."
He hesitated with his hand halfway to the seatbelt. "Have you ever driven one of these?"
For a minute, biting her lip, she stared at the glittering vehicle in confusion. No. But how hard could it be?
"Of course I have."
He looked skeptical. But a little more color had come back into his face. "When?"
She didn't answer. She just ran around to the driver's side, scrambled up and in, and prayed she wasn't about to completely destroy what her memory of the ads she'd seen told her was an enormously expensive...in her opinion, grotesquely overpriced... vehicle.
Miles's face didn't have that slightly gray undertone anymore...that shade of a man being led deliberately to certain death. But that did nothing to ease her conscience. Because she should have recognized that look. Should have listened to instinct when they'd stood on the street looking up and it had screamed at her to change her mind and do something else...go down the street to Macy's, maybe, and spend a small fortune she didn't have...rather than take the selfish route, and demand he do something he obviously wasn't up to doing.
She hadn't listened, and she was going to feel guilty about that for the rest of her life.
Beyond the balcony rail and below, Manhattan sparkled in afternoon light JoJo barely saw. Still troubled by the bizarre episode at the Empire State Building and by the strange and sullen withdrawal that had returned when Miles had entered the elevator at the apartment building, more adamant than ever that 'they' weren't going to scare him away from his home, she simply stared, oblivious. She stared so hard and with such full and undivided concentration that she jumped...visibly, she thought...when his hand brushed her shoulder unexpectedly.
"Come away from there," he said, the touch butterfly-light against her sweat-sheened and superheated skin. The barest suggestion of a suggestion of a touch, it made her shiver. But not from cold. Not in this heat...this tide of humidity rising from the streets so far below in a shimmering, ever-shifting heat-haze that tinted distant buildings a faint and dreamlike blue.
She shivered a little bit, her shoulders contracting in around themselves as if she'd suddenly turned cold. A shiver of...what? Apprehension, maybe, that nothing had been solved this afternoon, nothing had been revealed, no questions answered? Or was it a gnawing, deep-down sense of something having been set in motion? Something that must come to a head, and soon?
"Come away from there," he urged again, and she felt another shiver dance along her spine, surrounding her and chilling her despite the warmth of the day and the hand upon her shoulder.
"You need to lie down," she suggested, glancing at the clock. Ten minutes till four. Kind of early to be going to sleep. But as upset as he'd been just a little while ago... "I want you to lie down." It wasn't so much a suggestion now as an order.
"I never got a chance..." His voice was slow. Dreamy.
"A chance to what?" she asked when he didn't finish, struggling to remember what they'd been talking about, or even if they'd been talking about anything in particular.
"To say how much I like this dress." His knuckles...or was it his fingertips?...stroked an equally slow, equally dreamy path down the bared portion of her spine. Seeming to linger over each and every one of the small bumps that marked its path beneath her skin, they seemed determined to map the exact position of each, the exact amount they protruded, so that he could...
What?
"I'll go to bed," he murmured softly. "If you'll come with me."
"Miles..." She turned to face him at last. "I don't think...that's not what you need. Not right now, anyway. At least not until you have some time to..."
Apparently, he had other ideas. "How the hell do you know what I need?" he demanded, smiling a little, lifting his hand away from her shoulder and reaching around her, for her breast. Pressing its back to the underside, he lifted, easing the strain of the heavy and rounded weight away from the smooth silk of her halter top. "I never had a chance to tell you how incredible you look in this dress."
He'd moved up against her now. Holding her close with a hand at her waist, he pulled her back, against the incredible and perfect hardness of his shaft. Then, once he held her spellbound, he lifted his hands away from other parts of her body to work slowly, diligently, at the knot at the back of her neck...at the one, single barrier that stood between him and the eagerly aroused flesh of her breasts.
A second later, the knot came loose. Softer-than-summer-clouds of silk dropped away, and she heard him gasp. Heard the soft yet sharp rasp of air through a suddenly-tightened throat as he leaned over her, twisting his tall body a little to the side in the effort to lower his face to her without allowing the pressure he'd exerted to ease. Then, before she had a chance to do anything, before she had a chance even to think about taking him up on one of the outrageous and completely agreeable suggestions she sensed he was about to make, he reached for the floating yellow cloud of her skirt and released it so he could slide the soft folds down across her thighs, her knees and her calves, stopping only long enough to plant a long and sizzling row of kisses along fevered skin.
JoJo wasn't going to be able to take much more of this. Not that it looked like she was going to have to. He'd found the waistband of her panties...a pair of thin and lacy things she'd slipped on early in the morning, knowing somehow that whatever took place during the middle of the day, it was going to end like this. Was destined to end like this. She'd wanted him to see her wearing something special. Something so utterly feminine and alluring that he couldn't help but...
But he didn't see.
Barely hesitating when his fingers closed around the thin line of flimsy fabric, he tugged. Lace ripped with a tiny sound, and he pulled his hand back and tossed the torn scrap away impatiently. JoJo had no idea where it went, but she could easily imagine it floating over the railing. Floating on the softly sultry late-afternoon air, down and down, into the street. She could imagine it fluttering in a pale and drifting cloud to the pavement where someone would find it and wonder.
When she stood naked, barely inside the room, almost on the balcony and yet not quite, he turned her around. Pulled her to him, his hands stroking again, appreciatively and wonderingly, exploring the entire length of her. He touched bare shoulders, then explored again the outline of her spine. Cupped the cheeks of her backside as if he wanted to memorize the feel of them especially and pulled her closer to him.
He was erect.
Simply, heartstoppingly, magnificently erect.
It always thrilled her to feel his body reacting to hers. Titillated her to realize his reactions were in keeping with her own...that they were immediate, hot, and there was only one way to cool them and subdue them once they'd got started.
Shivering again, delighted as she hadn't been even moments before, when he'd sent such inconceivable currents of feeling through her with his slightest touch and his slightest look, JoJo quivered as if she'd been tuned too tightly, primed to expect what hadn't yet been delivered.
Finding her mouth, parting her lips with one quick, efficient thrust, his tongue sought the innermost depths of her.
In response, hers retreated.
His sought, found, conquered. Only to attack again and yet again, with fresh thrusts that drove her to...drove her beyond...
"Oh, God. Miles." JoJo barely managed to pull her mouth away from his. Barely managed to form the words or speak his name with lips that ached, feeling raw, and bloody, and woefully unfulfilled.
Miles wanted to hang on to her and never let go, like he'd never in his life hung on to anyone before. He wanted to hang on forever, so nothing could happen to her. So she wouldn't ever be torn away from him, he wouldn't ever have to lose her, too.
She'd looked so pretty in her floaty, pale dream of a dress. Just like a movie star. Better than a movie star. He'd hardly had a chance, what with one thing and another getting in the way, hardly had the wits to enjoy the way she'd looked. But he was going to enjoy her now. Was going to take his time, and enjoy her the way she deserved to be enjoyed. Totally. Fully. To the exclusion of everything else in the world.
God, his cock was in a frenzy. Fevered, swollen to an enormity he feared might cause it to rupture any time now, it was in a complete and utter chaos of frenzy, demanding to be let loose.
He told it to wait. Give him a chance, goddamn it, because he was not going to rip into her the way he had every other time they'd been together. Was not going to toss her to the floor right here and take her like some cheap and expendable...
Suddenly doubtful, remembering almost too late where he was, where they were, he pushed JoJo away from the patio doors and cast a quick look at the city sprawled beyond the balcony rail.
"Miles? What are you..."
"We should go inside."
It was inconceivable.
Impossible.
He'd never even considered doing...this...here. Never before.
Shirl would have died if he'd suggested it. She'd literally have dropped, frozen with horror, on the spot. Because Shirl hadn't been spontaneous or creative. She hadn't ever, in all her too-woefully-short life done to him the things or inspired in him the feelings JoJo was doing and inspiring right now. Right here on the open balcony.
It seemed like a little bit of a sacrilege to admit, if only just to himself, that he hadn't found sex with Shirl to be particularly challenging or especially inventive. That it had met a basic need, and not much else.
It seemed like a bit of a sacrilege, too, to realize he was letting her go. Without a whimper. Without a second thought. That in the next moment, when JoJo pulled herself back to him, her flesh meeting his with the unsubtle crash of a runaway freight train ramming the side of a mountain, he couldn't quite remember what color Shirl's eyes had been. Or exactly how her face had been shaped.
Now, in this moment and in all the moments that were going to follow, only the color of Jo's eyes had any importance. Only the shape of her face, slightly heart-shaped, a little too generous in the mouth, but an otherwise stupendously gorgeous face, held any place, any meaning, in his heart.
It felt sacrilegious. Maybe it was sacrilegious. But he was helpless. As helpless as a bee to the honeysuckle his mother had planted alongside the house in Connecticut, he was drawn to JoJo. Drawn into her. Drawn to try to become a part of her, one and the same, inseparable now, inseparable forever. Amen.
It was the love charm.
The thought startled him a little. Startled him a hell of a lot. He wasn't sure when he'd started to believe in it. Maybe he'd believed right from the start. From the very first instant when he'd turned away from the cabbie and looked down into JoJo's lovelier-than-the-loveliest brown eyes. He'd known in that instant there was something different about her. Something mystical. Magical.
Something perfect?
Hell, he didn't have an explanation for any of it. Right now, with his cock beginning to jump and rattle like a jackhammer trying to claw its way through a deposit of solid iron, with his mind humming the softest, most pleasurable music known to man...the vibration a woman made when she got inside his mind and refused to leave...he could have cared less about searching for one.
Explanations weren't necessary. It was only necessary for him to believe. Whether it was that strange and ugly slab of stone she'd worn around her neck until just today, or whether it was something else...something much more natural and much more chemical, she certain as hell had worked some kind of spell on him. One that made it impossible to even think about going back.
He was under the spell of the love charm. Completely and totally under its spell.
On that thought, he lifted JoJo. Felt the automatic softening of her muscles as he took her up into his arms, a phantom's breath of his imagination, a fantastical being with no substance...no weight, no solidity, no reality at all.
Swinging her easily, carefully, through the narrow hallway, he took her straight to the bedroom, to deposit her on the bed on top of a dark-blue comforter that only highlighted the pale sculpture of her body, throwing it into high relief, like the rarest of pale gems displayed to utmost advantage and utter perfection.
Not speaking, he made short work of his clothes...unbuttoning his blue and white striped dress shirt, shedding slacks, briefs, socks, tossing all of them into the corner. Allowing his tortured cock to explode with a shriek of victory he felt sure must bounce and echo, unmistakable for anything except what it was, off every building within a fifty-mile radius. Freed, it lunged, insane with its own need and unwilling to wait a millisecond longer, even when he ordered it to wait.
Reaching for the phone, he turned it off. There would be no interruptions. He would tolerate no interruptions. Then he moved across the bedroom, dimmed by dark curtains, dimmed so even the brightest light from outside cast only the faintest reflections of reflections, he moved to the bed and leaned over her. "I never knew," he whispered, lowering himself just enough that the tip of his shaft pressed itself against her and found the flesh that was every bit as needy and hungry as his. Flesh that was already moist and throbbing with a beat that matched exactly every hammering stroke of his heart.
He barely touched her. He only brushed her with the very tiniest tip of himself.
And still he wanted to scream.
"Or maybe I'd only forgotten. How incredible and soft a woman can be," he murmured, straining to hold that slightest contact at the same time he lowered his face to the curve of her neck, to nuzzle slightly, and to drink in the sweet and misty scent of her. "Or maybe I never knew in the first place."
Naked beneath him, spread deliciously across smooth and pressed sheets, smelling faintly of flowers and forest and mountains at dawn mixed with the slight but unmistakable musk that was a natural part of her, she was a dream. More than a dream. She was...naked. Waiting for him. Waiting, and shivering, her face making it clear she wondered if...when...
His erection, pulsing and thrusting before, seemed to have taken on a new urgency, a new enormity that said the end was near for him. Very near, despite his earlier wish to take it slowly...take her slowly. "Are you ready?" he asked softly and waited, needing some sort of answer before doing anything more.
"Miles, I need...to ask you a question."
Now? "What, sweetness?" His hips had begun to move. Barely, imperceptibly, but to move, nonetheless. Teasing her. Teasing him with his own teasing.
"This is going to be different, isn't it? Can you feel it?"
"That was two questions."
"Two you haven't answered."
Two Miles didn't think he could answer. Didn't think he should need to answer, because the answers were already so obvious. They seemed to scream in loud voices, whirling dervishes in the stillness of muted traffic from the street so far below and the sudden sharp click of the air conditioner kicking off so that the only air moving inside the room reached him in the form of waves of warmth that rippled from her and over her and around her. Soothing warmth, intoxicating warmth that stirred the stillness of an afternoon gone suddenly hushed and breathless with anticipation.
"Are you ready?" he asked again, more insistently.
"Yes," she managed, her voice an anticipatory tremor, as if something deep inside her had just been awakened. As her moisture flowed again without warning, a subtle misting that waited for his touch to turn it into a full-blown torrent.
Miles lowered himself closer to her. Very slowly. Nudging more insistently at her now, positioning himself with infinite care so that the entry, when it finally came, would be slow. Sweet. Spectacular.
The warmth of her seemed to intensify in that moment when his flesh sought hers and hers, mere millimeters away now, opened for him, inviting him. Feeling the faint dampness of her and the shivering tremor that swept through her when he nudged forward the tiniest bit, he urged himself into her more lazily still. As if he had all day and all night to accomplish what his cock demanded, insisted, begged, he accomplish now. Right now!
For the space of a heartbeat, he lingered close to her, conscious only of her swift and sharp inhalation of breath, and the pulsing he could almost feel in the air between them.
Whisk. He brushed against her.
Whisk. He was gone.
The tormented whorls of JoJo's flesh cried out silently and all too briefly in sheer delight, and then in the next instant began to wail just as silently, but piteously, in the throes of the deepest anguish she'd ever known. Why was he teasing her? Why did he keep her maddened with desire, unsatisfied and inconsolable, when he had to know she would do anything, everything, whatever he asked? If only he would allow her the release she craved!
Gossamer, a mere shimmer of heat that made even the fire that was her body feel chill and gray by comparison, his touch remained elusive...always, always, just beyond her control, just beyond her reach.
"Miles."
As if that was what he'd waited for, as if that was all he'd needed to hear, he came to her. Without warning, barely stopping for another fraction of a second to part her flesh and probe her readiness, he sheathed himself in her. Sheathed himself smoothly, swiftly, making himself a part of her. An inextricable, inseparable part that would always remain so.
"God." Her voice quivered as badly as her body.
She expected him to retreat. Thought that was only logical, was the only way to prolong the moment. Retreat, so he could enter again. But he didn't.
Pressing his hips down hard atop hers, pressing her into the mattress with a killing force that said he'd like nothing more than to press her all the way through it to the floor beneath the bed, he held her there. Held her as still as he held himself, while the sense of something coming, some ultimate convulsion of the universe about to break over them built all around them.
He held her, and then finally he moved.
He swung his hips slowly. Very slowly. He moved them in tight and constricted motions back and forth, his shaft changing its position and adjusting constantly inside her, its pressure only made that much more exciting by its lack of excitement.
Gently, she stroked his sweat-sheened upper arms. Marveled at the tight knots of muscle that stood out with the strain of holding himself away from her except for the one exquisite point of contact...the strain of holding himself so nearly still.
And marveled he could do so much, could start so much, without doing a single thing except swing his hips in the tiniest, all-but-nonexistent of motions.
"Fuck me," she whispered.
"All you had to do was ask," he replied, his voice a mere hint of a sound in sultry air that had all the makings of a whirlwind about to sweep them both away.
Still he did nothing except increase the radius of the circle he'd begun to make with his hips. He increased it just barely, so that now instead of a suggestion of movement, it had become a hint. So that the pressures, those delightful, torturous, ever-changing bits of touch on her and within her, became the most intolerable...the most demonic, most cunningly-wrought...motions any woman had ever experienced.
She was building, as she sensed him building. As she sensed the muscles of his entire body, not just the straining, supporting arms, had tightened with the first warning currents of a cataclysm about to come. A cataclysm that would no longer be prevented, but must only be endured. Must gladly be endured.
"Fuck me," she repeated.
For a moment, breath rasping, she thought he was about to refuse in favor of the slow non-movements that had stirred such an unbelievable tempest inside her. But then very suddenly and completely without warning he jerked his hips back. Jerked them up, ripping his shaft from her with an almost-audible sound of departure, leaving the center of her empty. Emptier than empty. A yawning cavern.
Crying out, she grabbed for his hips. Curled her fingers around the tight curves of his ass and urged him to stop, stop, for God's sweet and holy sake, stop! Because if he left her, if she ever again had to endure a moment without that most vital part of him buried in the most vital part of her, she would die.
Would forget how to think, how to move, how to breathe. How to live.
But Miles seemed to have no intention of leaving anything. Not completely. Not for long. Withdrawing until just the barest tip of him remained inside her, until she felt the crazed flesh of her opening stretching, ready to let him go and suffer the resulting agony of loss, he stopped. Held himself still again, held her as mesmerized as before, ready, yet afraid to breathe for fear the movement of even a single breath would sever that last slim shred of contact.
He held himself and looked down at her with jet-colored eyes that questioned.
And she felt the answer well up inside herself.
"Yes," she whispered hoarsely, unsteady arms reaching for him, fingertips finding and then tracing coaxing, pleading paths down incredibly strong arms. "I want you, Miles. I want you so..."
He drove the breath from her lungs with the ferocity of his next plunge. "God damn!" Crying out, he slammed himself into her, pulled himself nearly free, slammed again, and again, his flesh growing hot to the touch, seized by a sudden fever that it seemed no amount of release could ever ease. "Damn it...to...hell, woman. What...have you...done to me?"
"I haven't done..." her hands strayed now, passing across the velvet-smooth matting of hair at the center of his chest and sweeping rapidly upward to cup the sides of his face, the area around his ears and his temples. "Haven't done anything," she insisted as her fingers found a resting place, a sweet, sweet hideaway in the lush thickness of hair curling at the nape of his neck. Finding it, they began to massage too-taut cords that stood out beneath that hair and his fine-drawn and burning skin.
"Then...why...the hell..." He could barely speak. And her body urged him not to try. Sweltering suddenly, pierced through with a shaft of pure light, a shaft that seemed to guide his and lead it directly to its target on some sort of magical and mystical beam, JoJo began to crumble. To splinter, and to shatter.. To surge with a new current, a new and boiling delirium that begged him, pleaded with him, ordered him to come. Come, dammit, because she wasn't able to hold back a second longer. Wasn't able to...
As if something had broken inside her, something vital that could never, ever be replaced or repaired, she came. And he came. Suddenly entwined with each other and around each other, his body now directly on top of hers as if it wanted to crush every ounce of life from her at the same time that it was pumping all-new, invigorating and rejuvenating life back into her, they groaned. In soft, discordant and yet harmonious unison.
Finding his ear, JoJo nipped just a little. Just enough to catch the soft flesh of its lobe between her teeth and tug slightly, then immediately release in a way that seemed to be too much for him. Seemed to be just what he needed.
His body jerked. As if seized from within by some sort of terrible spasm, it gave a great and uncontrolled twitch that seemed to make him grow inside her. Grow to mammoth proportions, proportions so big and so fearsome she would never manage to survive...
Or was that her own body? Had she tightened around him so much that he only felt massive? Was she trying to hold him inside her, to take him hostage and demand as her ransom more, and then still more, of the fluid he spilled so willingly?
The answer was yes. And yes, and yes.
All of those things. More than just those things.
The torrents he'd started, the sleepy and lazy river of pleasure had become a raging runaway. They were not going to stop. JoJo knew they weren't. Knew she didn't want them to stop, not ever.
Mile's shoulders heaved. His breath rasped, a painful sound like that made by a man who'd been strangled and left to die. His arms shook, unable now to hold his smothering pressure away from her. Sweat rolled from him in great, glistening waves, and for one long, long second he seemed to hang suspended, somewhere between life and death, somewhere between fulfillment and failure. And she shehung with him. Caught in the balance, she waited on edge and ready for the one final signal, the one final instant when...
Suddenly, together in one final, bonding wave of searing temperature and adulation and encompassing, free-flowing wetness, they came as, JoJo sensed, neither of them had ever come before.
Then Miles was beside her. Face down on crisp sheets turned damp with the effort they'd expended, the results they'd achieved, he curled his arms beneath him and breathed great and sobbing breaths into the pillow he'd pressed tightly against his face. Somehow, he thought maybe that had been the cosmos at work. That it was taking over to finish what he'd been so sure it wasn't ever going to finish. Healing over the deep and gaping wounds inside his soul enough that he could get on with it. Get on with his life and figure out some kind of future for himself.
And it was about time.
Miles awoke to the sound of crying.
At first, swimming up through layer upon layer of incredible and unrelieved darkness, he thought it was the sound of his own tears. And that wouldn't have been unusual.
In the beginning, he hadn't slept at all. Had drifted repeatedly down and down, tantalizingly close to the bliss and forgetfulness of sleep, only to be jerked instantly and rudely back up again by imaginary clouds of searing and choking dust that filled eyes and nostrils, dust that seared his lungs with engulfing clouds of terrible darkness and a quaking terror that shook him from the inside out, shook him violently and left him cold with the sweat of both agony and rage. Cold and filled with visceral memories of roaring thunder that shook the ground and could never be described to anyone who hadn't heard it, hadn't felt it, hadn't lived through it.
In the beginning, he'd thought he would never sleep again. But gradually, with the passage of time, he had. Only to learn that with sleep came nightmares. Waking in the smallest hours of the morning to the sound of screams echoing through the quiet peace of Connecticut autumn, he'd had to make a conscious effort to stop screaming. And even when the screams had subsided, eventually, even when the dreams that precipitated them came with less and less frequency until he'd thought they were finally finished forever, he'd more often than not awakened himself with the sound of his own quiet sobbing in soul-felt grief that could never be eased.
Shivering, sighing, he lifted a heavy and still-groggy hand, forcing it through stifling heat that filled the bedroom. Intolerable, inhuman, sticky August heat unrelieved by even the slightest breath of air from anywhere. Lifted it to wipe away his tears. But his cheeks were dry. Miraculously dry, as they'd been ever since Jo...
Jo!
The thought of her, of her in tears, pulled him up out of sleep as violently as the screams had ever pulled him. More violently.
"Jo?" Leaning over her, close to her, he felt for her. Felt the sweaty stickiness of her bare shoulder, the dank weight of sweat-saturated hair and, ignoring all of that and ignoring the oven-like heat that made skin-to-skin contact abhorrent and undesirable, tried to pull her into his arms.
For a moment, she resisted. But only for a moment before she came willingly, turning toward him to bury her small, soft face tight against the bare skin of his chest...skin that tingled in the most soothing, most wonderfully promising way wherever and whenever she touched. "My God, Jo." His voice shook, sounding almost crazed with the terror of an awakening that was, in its way, even more terrible than awakening to the sound of his own sobs. "What is it? What's..."
"It's my love charm."
"What?" Not sure he'd heard correctly, not sure what that damned slab of rock could possibly have to do with sobs so heart-wrenching, so pulled up from the deepest and blackest abscesses of a soul in absolute despair, he cuddled JoJo's small, hot body tighter against him, marveling at the sheer wonder of finding her still here, still with him.
"It's g...g...g..."
"Shhhh, shhhh. Slow down." Using the pad of his thumb, he wiped the tears away from beneath her eyes. "Take a deep breath, and try again."
"The love charm, Miles. It's gone."
"Gone?" He didn't know why the idea sent such a sudden, sharp darting of fear through him. Or why that darting disappeared again so quickly that it was gone almost before he recognized it.
"I l...l...oh, Miles, I think I lost it." Pulling away from him a little, she tried to sit up. But he didn't let her. It felt too right, having her there beside him as she was, with her soft and naked skin snuggled in tight against his hot but nowhere-near-as-soft naked skin. Felt like she belonged there, and always had.
"Lost it? Where?"
"I don't know." Sniffling a little, she pressed her face to his shoulder. "I had it earlier. This morning, when you picked me up at the hotel. I thought I had it at the Empire State Building, but I don't know for sure. But I don't think I h...had it when we got back to the apartment. I can't remember, but...it must h...have fallen off and I didn't even notice it. Do you think we could go back there? I wouldn't make you go up to the top again, but if we could just go and ask. See if anyone..."
"Of course we'll go back, if you really want to. But, Jo, it was an ugly thing. I don't think anybody would turn it in even if they did find it."
"It was mine!" Sniffing now rather than sniffling, she sounded just a little furious. "And it wasn't always ugly. It was...magic. I know you don't believe that, but it's true."
"I never said I didn't believe."
"You never said you did, either."
Damn. When she tried to pull away from him this time, he let her.
It really was too hot for snuggling. The place was like a damned furnace. Like a...suddenly angry, he rolled over and stretched out his arm. Stretched it to its full limit, slipping his shoulder off the bed, and banged on the air conditioning unit mounted in the wall beneath the window.
Damned thing wasn't making a sound. Wasn't putting out a puff of air...hot, cold, or indifferent, either.
He banged harder, banged for another ten seconds before he lay back, lay quietly for a minute, studying the ceiling that was hidden by a darkness as complete as any he'd seen in his entire life.
The love charm was gone.
As much as the thing had, quite honestly, revolted him, he was sorry to hear that.
Ugly as it had been, it had seemed...lucky, somehow. Really, really lucky.
"Don't you think," he asked quietly, after quite a while, "if the charm really was magic..."
She turned her head on the pillow, her face a pale oasis in the surrounding darkness, her sweet brown hair invisible, but the misty-flowery scent of it reaching him clearly, as if the heat had intensified it somehow, and made it more potent. "What if it was magic?"
"If the charm really was magic...and that's a really, really big 'if', mind you...don't you think its supply of magic was...finite?"
"Finite?" She didn't seem to follow. And hell, that was okay. He was the one doing the talking, and he was barely following it himself.
"You said the pendant was beautiful the first time you saw it."
She sat up. Gasped in a way that quite literally stole his breath away and left his chest feeling constricted, as if he was about to have that long-dreaded and secretly-anticipated heart attack for sure. "Oh, Miles, it was more than beautiful. It was...green. The word doesn't even do it justice, but it was such a soft green. Such a glowing shade, like no shade of green you've ever seen before. It was almost luminescent. And I felt like it sang to me. I really did. It sang songs I'd think I'd been hearing for a long time...for most of my life. Only the jade seemed to amplify them somehow. To turn sound into something tactile...something...oh, hell. I know I'm not explaining it very well."
Rolling onto his side, propping his head on his hand, Miles watched her with eyes that had begun to grow accustomed to the darkness. "I think you described it really well. But the point is, I never saw it when it was green. I never saw anything except an ugly, speckled thing."
She sighed. Heavily. "Well, the old lady did say it was made for only me. She refused to take a penny for it, because she said it had been meant as a gift just for me. But I somehow assumed that when the right man came along...if he came along, that he would see the charm for what it really was, too."
"And she told you to wear it next to your skin."
"Next to my heart," JoJo confirmed immediately. "For as long as it took."
"As long as it took." Sighing, Miles lay back. Kicking off the sheets, he folded his hands behind his head and stared again at the pale blur of the ceiling.
"You think that meant it was finite?" JoJo asked at last, sounding like she might be afraid to hear his answer.
"Before God, Jo, I don't know."
"Because I'm really afraid of what's going to happen without it. I'm afraid you...I..."
Miles reached out and scooped her up with his arm. Despite the heat, he scooped her right up next to him again, into the curve of his body that had been empty for so long that felt like it had never been completely filled until just now, just this moment. "How could a thing like that go on forever, Jo? How could it go on indefinitely, without a limit?"
"But if it was magic..."
"Even magic has to run out sometime." Hell, he didn't believe he was even having this conversation! So seriously, as if a thing like a love charm could really exist. Without warning, the sound of the Chinese vendor's laughter came back to him. The one who'd found the mere suggestion of such a thing so uproariously funny he'd had to run into his shop to tell his whole family.
There was no such thing as a love charm. Period. But that wasn't going to help JoJo through the crisis she was having, or about to have. That wasn't going to help anyone at all.
"I think everything has to expend its magic sometime," he said softly, as gently as he could. "I think your charm must have given up most of what it had right at the first...right when we looked at each other, and..." He shivered, remembering the shock of the sizzle that had danced right through him. Almost...definitely...a mild electrical shock, even though there had been no outlet anywhere close by, and he hadn't been in contact with it even if it had been there. "I haven't said anything before, Jo. Maybe I didn't want to admit it, or maybe I just wasn't ready. But that day, when I found myself in Chinatown for no reason I could explain, I felt something pass through me. Something like..."
She snuggled against him again, deeper than ever. "What were you doing in Chinatown, anyway? You never really came up with a good reason."
"You first," he said with a low chuckle. "What were you doing there? Besides looking to ensnare the first unlucky slob who happened to stroll into your path?"
"Not ensnare?" she demanded, and when it seemed she was getting ready to sit up again, he clamped his arm down tighter so she couldn't do anything of the kind. "Not unlucky?"
"Well, okay. Maybe ensnare is a little strong. "But I don't know a better word for it, so it'll have to do."
"And the unlucky part?"
Sighing, he turned his head and pressed a kiss...a soft and fleeting one, to the top of her sweetly-scented head. "It sure seemed unlucky at the time. But looking back, I think that might have been the luckiest day of my life."
"What were you doing there?"
Another kiss. Another quick caress. "Same thing as you, I guess."
"You got sick of a hotel full of snotty novelists who all thought they were better than anybody else?"
He laughed a little, then shuddered even more. "Heaven forbid."
"Well, I never meant to go to Chinatown at all," she reflected. "So, maybe we really were there for the same reason. I'd never even heard of Chinatown before. Then I stepped off the plane at JFK, and this idea just...came over me. It was like it seized my mind and wouldn't let me be. So finally on Tuesday, when I'd gotten fed up with the convention and it was starting to wind down anyway, it was more than I could stand. I had to go there. Had to go to that one alley, and that specific place. Does that sound weird?" Suddenly, her tone was concerned. "Or psychotic?"
"I hope not," he said with another chuckle that didn't sound quite so amused. "Because if you were having psychotic episodes, then so was I."
"Seems like..." her voice faltered.
He tightened his arm around her. "Like what?"
"Miles, do you believe in fate?"
He stared at the ceiling, the way he'd been doing off and on ever since he'd awakened. Stared at it for so long that he started to worry he wasn't going to be able to come up with an answer. Not one he'd be willing to share with her, anyway. Because no matter how close they'd grown, there were still some things he couldn't share. Some he might never be able to share.
"I don't want to," he said at last, slowly. "I don't want to believe that everything happens for a reason. That everything's preordained, no matter how terrible..." His voice trailed off on a note of misery. He was thinking of Shirl again. Thinking of her looking up at him, her phone receiver clenched between her shoulder and her ear, ruffling through a disorganized manila folder with both hands and pursing her lips to blow him a little kiss as he'd stepped away from her for the last time.
The last time.
Fate.
When it came right down to something like that...something of that magnitude...he didn't want to believe in fate. Didn't want to believe in anything so cruel, so capricious and senseless. But then there was the love charm. That one small and seemingly-irrefutable bit of evidence that fate was there, fate was real, fate was at work all around them, all the time, in ways so big they couldn't be comprehended and yet so small they couldn't even be seen.
"You need to make a decision, you know," he said, thinking a change of subject was definitely in order, here.
"I do? Decision about what?" Sitting up, JoJo clutched the sheet tight around herself. "It's too hot to make decisions."
"I know. I don't have a clue what's come over the air conditioner. But you need to decide whether you're coming or going."
"Oh." Despite the show of calm, despite the carefully-calculated ease with which she tossed aside the sheet and rose to her feet, despite the seeming lack of concern with which she padded across the room to retrieve the shirt he'd discarded and pull it on to cover her nakedness, he heard the old, familiar quaking start up in her voice again. "I don't think there's any need to rush into anything," she murmured, crossing the room again to wander out into the hallway.
"You need to make a decision," he called after her. "You owe it to your parents. They'll be worried about you when you don't come home."
She came back to the door. He saw her, a vague form in a pale and oversized shirt, leaning against the doorframe.
"Listen to me, Jo." Miles sat up on the edge of the bed, stretching, made groggy and drowsy again by the heat. "I know what I'm saying. I've been in a kind of limbo myself. Putting off decisions I know have to be made. And limbo isn't good. It's not good at all."
"I'll keep that in mind." She disappeared from the doorway again.
"Just promise me you'll think about it, okay?"
She acted like she hadn't heard. Or maybe she hadn't.
Getting up from the bed, Miles groped for his jeans and pulled them on, then crossed the room again to bang on the air conditioner. It remained silent. Mocking him so much that after a few seconds he gave up and reached between the curtains to wind the small lower panel open as far as it would go. Five inches, no more. But that should be enough to let in some air. Enough, at least, to take the edge off the terrible and accumulated...he was reaching for the cord, getting ready to pull the curtains back and let some goddamned air into this goddamned inferno, when JoJo screamed.
The sound came from the living room. A long and spine-clenching earthquake of sound that had him moving as he hadn't moved since that morning in September, running in a full-out, near-panicked race across a room so dark, so suddenly turned-around and confused by his own reaction to the horror of that sound that he crashed into a wall and stubbed his toe, nearly ripping it off on the leg of a dresser that hadn't been moved an inch in five years.
Cursing, hopping now, trying to keep his weight off the shrieking, aggravated, maybe-even-broken toe, he'd made it into the small hallway leading past the spare bedroom and the bathroom when JoJo shrieked again. Shrieked his name.
"Miles! Oh, my God! You've got to see this! This is...oh, my Goooood!"
Suddenly, dropping to his knees right at the corner where the hallway opened out into the foyer, which in turn opened into the living room, he didn't want to see. Covering his face with his hands, sobbing into them, he didn't ever again in his life want to see anything, anywhere, any time, that had to be prefaced with a shrieked and disbelieving 'Oh, my God!'. But JoJo was still screaming. He heard a crash as the patio door flung open, another crash as she stumbled into something and it fell, then the sound of breaking glass.
He heard what sounded like a fight to the death, and that got him to his feet again. 'Oh, my God' or no 'oh, my God', it sent him barreling into the living room at full blast, ready to do battle with whatever the hell disaster had happened now.
JoJo stood in the opening of the patio door. He could see the silhouette of her, pale against an oddly dark...an unnaturally dark, and therefore undeniably frightening...sky. He could see her standing there in his shirt, hot air motionless and strangely silent around her, and he could see she had her back turned to him.
"Jo?" Heart pounding in his ears, a sickness like none he'd ever thought he'd feel again roiling up inside his stomach, he crossed the room slowly. Barely able to force one foot in front of the other. He skirted the downed and shattered floor lamp, hoping like hell he wasn't about to slice an artery in a bare foot by stepping on unseen glass, and went to stand beside her. Went to look where she looked.
At something he had never...not even in the most fevered nightmare he'd ever suffered...thought he would see.
Nothing.
Blackness out beyond the balcony railing, where Manhattan should be. Blackness, shrouding streets from which even sound, even the incessant blaring of traffic and horns, no longer rose. Blackness, illuminated only by a very large, enormously lopsided and sinister red moon hovering just above the eastern horizon.
"God in heaven," JoJo breathed. "I think it's a blackout. I think...God in heaven, the whole city's gone!"
And that was all he heard. Because faced with that bloody and apocalyptic specter, faced with the stunning weight of that hush, and a darkness so complete and so unnatural it could only be the work of the most evil, most shamelessly cruel forces known to man...evil that had struck once before, so swiftly and with such devastating results...Miles was on his knees in the doorway. Was on his knees, his hands covering his face, the tears that had been too long held back streaming freely, streaming endlessly, from aching eyes.
"Name of God! Miles!" For a minute, maybe longer, JoJo couldn't move. Couldn't force herself to move. He'd appeared at the balcony door so unexpectedly and then collapsed so unexpectedly, going to his knees with a blood-chilling cry of despair like none she'd ever heard before, that her mind needed that long to catch up. Needed longer, probably, but at least after that minute or minute-and-a-half, she was able to draw in a breath and rush to him. To bend over him, hands shaking, and lay them on his shoulders.
At least she was able to do that much, though there her ability to help him, to understand him, ended abruptly, sickeningly, at the brick wall he'd put up around his past.
"Miles? Talk to me?" she urged gently, very gently, lest she startle him and precipitate another of these...what? Near breakdowns? Nervous attacks?
She didn't know what to call them. Didn't know much of anything, except that she didn't want to see another of them ever again.
He said something. Sobbed it into the hands that still covered his face, as if the sight of that already-fading-to-pink moon had been the worst thing he'd ever seen. Something so terrible and awe-inspiring he couldn't force himself to look at it again.
"What?" Dropping to the floor next to him, she slipped one arm around him. Pulled him closer, pulled him all the way to her and then urged his head onto her shoulder. "I didn't understand, Miles. What did you..."
Again, he mumbled. Again, it wasn't entirely audible or understandable. But at least she managed to catch a few bits and pieces of it.
"...end..." he gasped. "...the world. And I...so guilt...I never meant...I was supposed..."
"You've got to calm down." Cradling his head to her, rocking him slowly now, she murmured soft and comforting sounds into the sleep-mussed hair at the top of his head. "It's only a power failure," she said, staring out at the uncommon and unrelieved night beyond the balcony railing, and at the moon that had begun to rise in earnest now, losing most of its initial, slightly shocking color.
Under the circumstances, she didn't blame Miles for being a little freaked out. The sight had unnerved her pretty badly, too...all that blackness out there where the city should be a blaze of lights. And that ghastly, misshapen thing hanging in the sky above it like a portent of the apocalypse?
That had been enough to stand the hair on her arms on end, for sure. It had been more than enough to startle a scream from her when she'd come upon it so unexpectedly like that. But Miles's reaction...
Like the episode earlier in the day, at the top of the Empire State Building, his reaction seemed all out of proportion, all out of kilter, to the situation.
Once again, he was hiding something. But unlike the last time, this time the shock of his reaction had damned near killed them both.
In her arms, he'd quieted a little. The shaking she'd initially felt rumbling through his entire body had eased, though it hadn't quit completely. Might not quit completely for some time to come. The sobs were almost gone, too, his breathing almost back to normal, though he clung to her as if she was his last lifeline in a world that, in the blink of an eye and the start of a very strange and unusual historic event, seemed to have become too much for him.
"You know it's just a power failure," she said again. "Don't you?"
"I know." He didn't lift his face from her shoulder, didn't release her or encourage her to release him. Not that she ever would. Not until he gave some sign that he was ready to be released. "I've heard about such things. But I've never seen one. Not one like this. And that moon..."
"They call it a blood moon." She kept her voice deliberately soft and purposefully calm. "At least, that's what my parents and grandparents always called it. It has something to do with particulate matter in the atmosphere..."
At last he lifted his head, though he still continued to cling tight to her, the places where their skin touched beginning to turn to water in the damp and sticky heat. "What are you?" he inquired and choked out a little laugh. "A meteorologist?"
"No, but the subject's always fascinated me. Blood moons have always fascinated me. Supposedly it's a reflection from the sun on the other side of the earth as the moon comes up on this side. Any time there's particulate matter in the atmosphere and the reflected rays are just right..."
He lowered his face against her shoulder again, shuddered again with a violence that shook him through and through, and made her worry he was about to burst into those strange and haunted, wrenching sobs again. "I've seen it before. When...when...it's something I really don't care to see again. I would have avoided looking if I'd known the thing was hanging out there like that."
"Well, next time I'll just screech 'blood moon', okay? And you'll know not to look. You can even climb under the bed, and I won't mind. As long as you don't..."
He laughed a little, a miserable sound that conveyed no warmth, no real amusement, no real desire to laugh at all.
He was hiding something again. Definitely keeping something back, and she had a suspicion it was just about to tear him apart.
"You ought to let it out, you know," she murmured.
He didn't answer, though she waited.
"I don't know what it is, Miles. But you ought to let it out, because this can't be good. This..."
"Freaking out?" he suggested with that same wry, almost bitter humor.
"For lack of a better term, yes. This freaking out can't be good. For anybody."
Again, he didn't answer.
"I mean, you can't spend the rest of your life hiding from buildings, and airplanes, and elevators, and strange-looking red moons. It just wouldn't be...practical."
When he laughed a little this time, it sounded more normal. Not exactly the way a laugh should sound, but a little more normal. A little more stable. He lifted his head from her shoulder and sat up, away from her. For a minute he seemed almost himself again. Then he glanced at the balcony, the faintly-pink and still rising moon beyond, and his control seemed to crumble again. "God," he murmured, seeming transfixed by the sight. "I need a drink."
"Me, too."
Suddenly, so suddenly she wanted to pull him back down and tell him she didn't think he should leave just yet because he obviously needed more comforting and so did she, Miles got to his feet. "I'm going to wash my face," he said. "Why don't you look in the fridge and find us something? I think there's probably some wine in there."
Unable to stop him or to bring him back, she got to her feet, too. "How long do you think the power's going to be out?"
There was a moment of silence. "I don't know," he said at last. "I don't have a clue. Like I said, this doesn't happen very often. Hasn't happened in my lifetime. So...I'd imagine it's going to take some doing to get everything back."
"So. We could be stuck here a while? In the dark?"
His footsteps had started to move away from her, the dim outline of his body blending back into the darkness from which it had exploded. But now he stopped again. "I suppose so. Though we aren't stuck, Jo. We can go down the stairs any time."
"And not come back up?"
He laughed. "Well, I don't know about you. But once I'm down, I'm certain as hell not going to think about hiking back up thirty-one flights unless I have one hell of a goddamned good reason." He started to move away again.
"There's probably some food in the refrigerator that we should think about eating, too," she called after him. "Before it starts to spoil."
"Get it," he replied, his voice fading down the hallway toward the bedroom and the bathroom. "I'll be back in a minute."
Casting another, slightly wary glance at the moon and the velvety, unrelieved darkness that lay below, JoJo went to the kitchen. Opened the refrigerator and realized she wasn't going to be able to see a thing in that ink-black cave. Fumbled in a couple of kitchen drawers until she found matches and a candle, lit one, and used it to inspect the refrigerator's contents, looking for the most perishable, the most endangered items.
Sherbet. A pint of it. Now, that would make quite a mess. She set it out.
Fruit salad. The good stuff, from the looks of it. She set that out, too.
Cold cuts, designer mustard, blocks of cheese ready for slicing or just for eating by the chunk, and deli croissants in a brown paper bag. Suddenly ravenous, realizing they'd never gotten around to eating since he'd picked her up outside her hotel that morning, she set those beside the rest.
Now, for the wine.
The first bottle was merlot. "A rich and supple, full-bodied wine," she read aloud from the label. "Moderately tannic with undertones of toffee and tea. Yeccchhh." Not a wine drinker, knowing very little about the stuff, she decided that wasn't for her.
The next was a chardonnay. A gleaming, golden-white liquid that held out much more promise. "Highly complex and aromatic," she read, frowning. "Delicate and fruity with citrus notes." Citrus notes were better. She could live with them.
Moving quickly, she found a tray and plates, napkins and silverware, and carried everything out to the balcony. And once she'd spread everything out, she sat on one of the small metal folding chairs to stare at the moon, no longer frightening now, that floated above the velvet-dark city. She waited for Miles with the opened bottle of chardonnay next to one elbow where she could reach it easily for an occasional cooling swig, and the impossibly-twisted lucky bamboo he'd bought so impulsively on their last visit to Chinatown at the other. Heels perched on the very edge of the chair, she drew her knees up tight against her chest and arranged Miles's dress shirt around her to cover her nakedness, but not restrict what little air seemed to move in this still and silent, virtually motionless night.
It was still a little frightening. But it was beautiful too, at the same time. Incredibly beautiful. It gave her time to think about the inexplicable and thinly-veiled horror of the scene she'd just witnessed. And the horror of the other one. It gave her time to think about the questions she was going to have to ask, and how to ask them in a way that wasn't going to scare Miles away.
They were questions that really did need to be asked. She really did need to know why the wonderful, sweet and caring man who'd treated her to fast rides in his stunning blue Hummer and slow rides in a white carriage in Central Park, who'd made love to her and risked everything to do something just because she'd wanted to do it was in such terrible torment.
If she was to stay, she needed answers.
Confused, she reached for the bottle and took another long, slow drink. "Citrus undertones," she muttered in a low voice and set it back on the table.
"Jesus God, woman."
She didn't look at Miles when she heard the faint scrape of the other metal chair as he pulled it back, then sat on it. For some reason, she didn't think she could look, not even if there would be little to see in the darkness. "I can almost see why you insist on living all the way up here," she murmured, hoping he'd read the invitation in her words and start to explain himself of his own free will. "Even if you are freaked out by heights. The view's worth it. Even with the power out, and no..." She reached for the wine again.
"You're not drinking that from the bottle?" He sounded scandalized. And a little amused.
Knowing she blushed, JoJo felt glad for darkness broken only by the wavering glow of a fat white candle in a tall brass holder that looked like it could have come from a church. She'd dragged the heavy thing out here and lit it, more to be comforted by that small flicker of light than to illuminate anything with it.
"I have glasses," he muttered. "All you had to do was look in the cupboard in the dining room."
"Right. Stumbling around in the darkness."
He didn't answer. Behind her, his chair scraped again as he got back to his feet, and she knew when he left...could feel the lack of him in the air around her for the minute, no more, that it took him to return and reach past her to set a pair of stemmed crystal glasses on the table.
"You still haven't answered my question." She accepted the glass of wine he poured for her, twirling the delicate stem between her fingers and still not looking at him, not changing her position that was so comfortable, yet so absolutely defended and secure.
"What question was that?"
"About what the hell happened today." What the hell happened just now.
He sighed. Poured himself some wine, and took a long, long drag that nearly drained his glass. "I was stupid for not telling you before," he said in a heavy, leaden voice. "Stupid for letting myself get caught up in a situation that could only come to a bad end because I knew..."
"Miles, why the devil didn't you tell me you were afraid of heights?"
"Because then I'd have had to tell you the reason," he replied, sounding miserable. "And that's not something I like to talk about. With anybody. It's a part of the past that...well, like I said. I did a really, really stupid thing this afternoon. I should have said no. I should at least have..." Dropping his arm over her shoulder, he pointed with his nearly-empty glass, tilting the rim slightly in the direction he wanted her to look. Though of course there was nothing to see out there. No lights, no...nothing. "Jo, the twin towers used to stand right over there. The World Trade Center."
She didn't know what to think about that...didn't know what it was supposed to make her think. She'd been aware of that, of course. How could any person who'd been alive and conscious that day, who'd watched the unimaginable and unthinkable become frighteningly real in a heartbeat, right in front of the world's horrified and disbelieving eyes, not be aware of it? But she'd been skirting the issue ever since she'd arrived in the city. There was a lot she'd wanted to experience about New York, a lot she'd wanted to see and to know. But that was one thing she'd thought she couldn't bear to get too close to...one thing she'd thought she didn't have the strength to handle now, and maybe not ever.
"I don't want to think about that right now," she said quietly.
"Aren't you the one who keeps saying sometimes you have to think about things you don't want to think about?" he asked just as quietly.
"Maybe, but that's not what I want to talk about right now, not what you need to talk about."
"And just how the hell do you know that?" he asked, his tone turning defensive, and maybe even a touch deadly.
"I know it because we need to talk about you. About what happened this afternoon, and about your..." Grabbing her glass, she took a long, deep swig of wine. "We need to talk about what the hell happened just a few minutes ago. You need to give me some kind of an explanation so I can have a clue what's going on around here. So I can..."
Miles was silent for a second. Ten seconds. "In a roundabout way, I am trying to explain, Jo." Seeming determined to forestall all her questions, all her attempts to get him to talk sense, he stretched out his arm and pointed over her shoulder again with a single extended finger to that spot far to the south and a little to the right. "Like I said. The twin towers used to stand right there. And, Jo, I used to work there. I used to work in tower one. When I used to be able to work."
JoJo gasped. Dear God, she put all her heart and her soul, all the feeling she had, into the sound. Releasing her legs, she dropped her feet to the tiled floor of the balcony, his shirt a mad swirl of pale fabric that hung around her body like a tent and seemed to dwarf it. Swinging all the way around in her chair, she stared at him.
He couldn't see her eyes or the expression in them. He could see only the twin pricks of gold, reflections from the candle she'd lit in his mother's antique brass holder. But he could see her face. In that flickering, fluttering bit of illumination, he could see the look on her face.
She looked horrified. Absolutely horrified, as horrified as she'd sounded when she gasped, her hand coming up instantly to catch the two halves of the shirt collar and draw them together, closing them over the wide expanse of naked breast she'd revealed up until this point.
There was more to tell. A lot more. But Miles was surprised by how he felt in that moment, with even just a little of it out, on the table for JoJo to see.
He felt relief. More relief than he'd ever dreamed possible from such a simple admission. Such a facing-up to what he'd tried for too long to barricade inside. He should thank her for making it so easy to say all the things that had needed to be said for far too long.
He'd worked in the Trade Center, and JoJo had made the connection. He could see it in her expression, even before she asked the question. "Oh, God, Miles. You weren't..."
"There that day?" The words were harder to say than he'd expected. Harder, despite the sweet sense of lightness and the easing of burdens that had already started to creep over him. "Of course I was. It was a work day, and..."
"Oh, God." She looked desolate now. Really, really desolate. "I had no idea. Not even a hint."
"Of course not. Why would you, when I nev..."
"You don't have to talk about this if you don't want to."
His smile felt crooked and twisted, and he bent over the table, reaching for some of the sliced meat and a croissant, paying extraordinary care to how much Dijon mustard he spread on the concoction. Doing anything to hide his expression from her wide and astonished gaze until he'd figured out exactly how in the hell he was supposed to go on with this, now that he'd started.
But then he realized JoJo was the right person. She'd been the right one...maybe the only one...all along. So that made it easier. A little.
"My office was on the eighty-sixth floor," he said, sitting back and reaching for the bottle, to pour himself more chardonnay. God knew he was going to need it.
"So that's why when you looked into the gift shop this afternoon and saw the number eighty-six..."
"I just...lost it. I'm sorry, Jo. I should have warned you. I was the only person from my office who made it out alive that day." He stared past her, out into the void where a part of his life...and all of the city right now...was missing. Some parts of both missing much more than others. "The only one." Even to himself, his voice sounded very small, very lost, very lonely and bewildered. As if it had all happened just a few minutes ago, instead of...
"Miles." JoJo sounded all sick, and hoarse, and watery. The way he felt most of the time. Gently...oh, so gently, she lay a hand on his knee. A warm and lovely, loving, reassuring hand. "You really don't have to do this."
"Yes, I do. I should have done it a long time ago. It just took you, and your damned, infernal love charm, to make me understand that."
"I don't..." Meeting his eyes briefly, then tugging her gaze away again, she lifted her hand to her chest, where she'd worn that hideous piece of junk, a lost and mournful expression passing across her face. "I didn't really believe the thing was a love charm."
But she had. And she'd mourned the loss of it. A loss that, strange as it might seem, was to her as grievous and agonizing as any he'd ever suffered.
JoJo looked exactly the way he felt, and that gave him the courage to go on. That and another long and slow slug of wine. "Well, I do believe it," he said gruffly. "I believe something sure as hell happened to me the other day. Because I wasn't ever going to...Jo, my fiancée and I worked together."
"Fiancée?" She looked sick.
Determined to see this horror through now that he'd started it, Miles nodded once, a quick and jerky motion. Then stared out at the darkness again. "Her name was Shirl. We were both investment counselors at the same firm. Her desk was no more than fifteen feet from mine, and that morning..." He swallowed. Hard. Shivered. Took another enormous gulp of wine, draining his glass and then holding it out to JoJo for a refill.
While she poured, he went on. "The only reason I'm sitting here today, Jo, and not lost in that cloud of debris with no trace of me ever found is because of the goddamned United States Post Office."
JoJo blinked, the expression on her face so comical in its utter confusion that he would have laughed had there been one single, God almighty thing to laugh about.
"For some unknown, inexplicable reason, the Post Office began to send another firm's mail to us. It started out of the blue about six weeks before...before. This other firm was on the thirty-fifth floor, and they had a similar name to ours. We'd tried everything...complaining, begging, returning the stuff to the senders. But the same pieces of mail would only come right back to us a couple of days later. So finally my boss got fed up and told me to make it go away. The only way I could think to do that was to gather up everything the Post Office misdirected to us, and physically haul it down to thirty-five myself. Then I'd pick up the stuff they'd received that belonged to us, and drag it all the way back upstairs. It was irritating as hell. But it worked."
"And it saved your life?"
Glum now, staring at the remains of his second glass of wine, Miles swirled the last of the straw-colored liquid around and around as if something in the depths of it fascinated him as much as he'd ever been fascinated by anything. And he nodded. "The very first thing I did every morning of every business day was go straight to my office on eighty-six. I'd stop by the coffee room, stuff a donut in my mouth, grab the big cardboard box where we collected all the mis-delivered mail, and haul it back down to thirty-five where it belonged. That morning...September eleventh...was no different. Except that morning I stepped out of the elevator on the thirty-fifth floor with half a donut still in my hand, took three steps, and that's when the plane hit the building."
JoJo was silent for a long time. So silent he actually began to ask himself if he'd really told her any of it, or if this might not be another of those horrible dreams and he was about to wake up screaming again. For that matter, he had to stop for a minute and consider that JoJo herself might be nothing more than a dream...a very wishful one because, though he might dream he could tell someone all of those things, he knew he'd never dare.
But JoJo looked real. Felt real, too, even considering the strangeness of Manhattan without lights and that awful, apocalyptic moon he'd seen in that first instant when he'd looked out through the patio doors. Shuddering, feeling his strength and his courage begin to ebb away fast, he held out his glass for more wine.
JoJo picked up the bottle and shook it a little. "Sorry. It's all gone."
Instantly, he was on his feet, glad to have something to do. Glad to have an excuse to take a break. There was still a lot more to be said. Still a lot more JoJo wanted...needed...to know. Reading the expressions on her face, he could see the questions bubbling around inside her head. And she had a right to the answers. It was the least he could do if he really expected her to stay here with him...and that was another thing he was going to have to come to terms with. Her. Here. A part of his life. But first...
"There's another bottle in the fridge. I'll just go and..."
"The merlot?" The flicker of candlelight gave her expression of disgust an oddly menacing twist.
Miles almost laughed. "Don't tell me. You're Erie, Pennsylvania's premier wine connoisseur."
The look of disgust deepened. "I don't know the first thing about wine. But I saw that stuff when I opened the other bottle. It looked...evil. Dark, and murky, and...what's with the undertones of toffee and tea business, anyway?" She shuddered. "Blecccchhh."
"First rule of wine drinking," he called back over his shoulder as he made his way through the stifling and lightless apartment, giving the shattered lamp a wide and careful berth. "Don't believe everything that's on the label."
It took him less than a minute to find the bottle of merlot and pop the cork, another minute to find the small battery-powered radio he'd always kept in a kitchen cabinet for 'emergencies', never dreaming he'd actually have a reason to use it one day. Other than the occasional 'emergency' trip to the beach, of course.
By the time he got back to the table on the balcony, he'd heard plenty. "My God," he said, placing the radio between the remains of the sherbet he didn't really remember helping her eat, and the sliced ham he didn't remember eating, either. "You won't believe this."
"What?" She sounded alarmed.
"The blackout goes all the way the hell into Canada. Ottawa's out, and Toronto. Buffalo, and Cleveland, and Detroit, and God knows who else, too."
"You're kidding." Despite the fact the merlot had seemed something less than appetizing to her, she was already holding her glass out to him. "What about Erie? Did they say..."
"Didn't mention it. I just can't conceive...they think it was lightning. Or a fire. Nobody really knows what the hell is going on, and so...where were we? I'd like to get this finished, Jo. While I've got my nerve up. And so I can go on. Start fresh. Or at least try to start over again."
"Miles, are you sure you're up to any more of this?"
"No," he replied quite truthfully. "I'm not sure. But I've come this far..."
She looked doubtful for a few seconds. Then she sat back, her glass cupped between the palms of her hands. She leaned `way back and propped her feet up on the balcony rail.
And he felt a sudden, slight stirring deep down in his balls.
Christ in heaven. She was bare-ass naked under that shirt. His shirt. She was bare-assed naked but there she was, facing out over the whole good, goddamned city so that if somebody out there had a telescope and a little bit of x-ray vision, he was for damned sure getting one hell of a show right about now.
It was all Miles could do to contain the hot spurt of jealousy that roared through him, making him want to leap right up to the railing and scream, for God and everybody to hear, that nobody was supposed to look at anything. Because dammit, dammit, dammit, she was his, and he wasn't going to stand for any kind of...
Which was absolutely ridiculous because she was no more his than the man in that big, silvery-white moon that at last looked normal. So completely normal he wondered how it could ever have seemed threatening.
"You never told me about your fiancée," JoJo said at last, seeming to have a lot of trouble with the word. "You never told me what happened to your...Shirl?"
Miles sat back, too, his pose mimicking JoJo's, though he didn't put his feet up on the railing. "Shirl was wearing a light green suit that morning," he murmured. "A brand new one she'd bought the Saturday before at Saks. It was a pretty thing...the color of little apples when they first start to grow in the springtime. By the time I dropped my briefcase on my desk and collected the box of mail to be delivered, she was already on the phone with two more lines ringing. I turned around and left, and that was the last time I ever saw her."
"Oh, Miles." JoJo's feet came down then, and her expression and voice echoed a loss as great as his own. "I'm...God, I don't know what to say. Sorry doesn't seem to be enough."
He shrugged. "I don't think there's anything you can say. I wanted to go back upstairs, of course. The instant I knew something had gone horribly, horribly wrong up there where Shirl was sitting in her pretty green suit right next to the windows, I think maybe I tried. But the people in the office where I was...their fire warden wouldn't hear of it. He was shoving everybody to the stairs, yelling at us to go down, and..." Miles shrugged again. "I went down."
"You couldn't have known," JoJo said quietly. "How it was going to end, I mean. You couldn't have...nobody did. Nobody ever imagined..."
"That's what the shrink kept telling me. But I still..."
"So you did get counseling?"
"It was hard not to, Jo. When all I could ever think about was..."
He must have sounded defensive. He knew he'd sounded defensive when she gave him a look of mild but unmistakable reproach. "No one's blaming you for getting help, Miles. No one could ever blame you, after what...I just wish you'd told me sooner. So I could have been a little more sensitive, and..."
He finished his glass of wine. And, dear Lord, how many glasses had that been, anyway? Two? Three? More? However many it was, he'd downed them without even tasting them...without even knowing he was doing it. He was definitely starting to feel a little fuzzy in the head. He hadn't done this since the weeks after the disaster...weeks he'd spent at the old house in Connecticut, not answering the phone or the door, not talking to a soul except when it became necessary to lay in a fresh supply of liquor. The Lost Weeks, as he always thought of them. Eleven of them. Until he'd finally, just barely, managed to convince himself he had to come back to the city. To the apartment where all of Shirl's things had waited just as she'd left them that last morning, to be gathered up and shipped to her parents in Virginia. To try to piece his life back together, though of course that hadn't worked. He hadn't worked. Nerves shot, confidence shot, concentration shot, he hadn't been fit to do a day's work since.
It was just a damned good thing his old man had left him a wad of money. Otherwise, he'd be on the street by now. Living in a dumpster in some alleyway, scrounging his pennies to buy another bottle of rotgut, and no doubt wearing a tin-foil hat to keep the invading aliens from reading his thoughts. Not that aliens would want to read something so dark and...
Shit. JoJo'd been saying something. And he'd missed it.
"What?"
"I said if you'd told me I never would have forced you to..."
Incredibly, he smiled. Incredibly, he was able to smile. "Nobody forced me to do anything, Jo. Nobody...I thought it was time. It took me nearly three months to come back here, to the apartment. And after that it took me two hours, just milling around in the lobby, to get up the nerve to get into the elevator. But I did it because I had to. Because I wasn't going to let some band of goddamned, no-count monsters take everything I'd had. They'd already stolen Shirl, and my life, and almost my sanity. Right out from under my nose, while I wasn't even looking. I wasn't about to let them drive me out of my home, too. And today...well, I thought I was ready. I think I'd like to be ready, because that might mean...but, then, I don't know who the hell I'm trying to kid, anyway. I'm not going to get over it. I'm never going to get over it. And I'm certain as hell going to have to find a new line of work, because I'm not going back to Wall Street, either. Ever. But..."
"Still, you should have told me. I might have..." JoJo lifted the bottle of merlot, and Miles was startled to realize most of it was gone. The bottle, boasting proudly of its toffee and tea undertones, sat three-quarters empty on the table between them. "I don't know what I could have done, Miles. I just know that I should have known, so I could have tried."
They'd been sitting on the balcony with nothing but moonlight and the fluttering glow of their one lonely candle to hold the encompassing darkness at bay for...what? An hour? Two hours? More?
When JoJo made a move to fill his glass, he grabbed it away from her and set it on the floor just inside the living room, where she couldn't reach it and start him back down the path toward oblivion that hadn't in the end really been oblivion at all. That had only been a means to postpone the inevitable. Drunkenness wasn't the answer. Wine wasn't the answer. No matter how drunk he got, the problems always came back in the morning. They were always there with sobriety and the cold, hard light of dawn. And they were usually worse for the wear. But for tonight...for tonight...
For tonight, the wine had done its job. It had hazed over some of the hurt. Had made it tolerable, at least enough that he could relax a little, and watch JoJo as she sat motionless and beautiful, less than an arm's length away.
Warm air, barely moving across the balcony, brushed her face...her lovely, radiant, wine-and-candleglow-flushed face...and fluttered the hem of his blue and white dress shirt around her legs. Long legs. Shapely legs. The shapeliest he'd ever seen. Ever. Whenever he wore that shirt again, he'd be sure to think of her. Of her bare skin stroking the inside of the smooth cotton. Warming it, and infusing it with her scent. Warming a night that was already so sultry and sweltering a faint sheen of sweat clung to her skin, coating her face, her throat, the exposed whiteness of the upper curve of her breasts in the vee of the shirt. Sweat that formed miniscule droplets, no doubt, in the folds beneath those breasts and all the deep and lush valleys beneath.
"What could you possibly have done?" he asked, hating himself for transferring so much of his misery over to her even if she had been sympathetic and understanding and so willing to listen.
"I don't know." She sounded miserable. "Gone to Macy's when you suggested it?"
This time he knew he smiled and knew the smile was real.
Macy's was safe. He could handle Macy's. "We can do that tomorrow if you want."
"How can you just be so glib?" she demanded, a spark of anger slashing through her eyes. "After everything you've just told me, how can you..."
"Because, believe it or not, Jo, that's the way people are wired."
"I don't understand."
He sighed. Dragged his hands through his hair, and wished he could go back to that moment. That beautiful, incredible moment when he'd had nothing to do but look at her looking out at the moon. "The first reaction when something horrible happens and you realize you're standing in the street with a cloud of dust coming down around you, trying to find a place to hide from it even if there is no place to hide, is 'thank God I'm alive'. Then you wonder 'why the hell am I alive?' And then you start asking yourself, over and over, for days and weeks and months on end, 'why the hell am I alive when everybody else...' I still have nightmares sometimes. Though not lately. Not since you...I keep dreaming about Shirl, sitting at her desk by the window. I keep dreaming she looked up, looked around, just in time to see that huge goddamned airplane coming straight at her. And then I wake up screaming or crying. Wondering if she had time to know what was going to happen to her. Or did it happen so fast that she never had time to think about anything at all? I always, always wind up wondering why it wasn't me. Why I wasn't sitting fifteen feet away from her, where I was supposed to be." His voice had started to shake. He couldn't stop it, and for the first time he didn't want to. "Survivor's guilt. That's what they tell me it is. Post traumatic stress disorder. And a dozen other things I couldn't pronounce if you gave me a billion dollars. But it all boils down to the same thing. I wasn't where I was supposed to be, and I've been beating myself up over it ever since. Until you came along the other day with your silly-ass goddamned love charm, and..."
JoJo expelled her breath in a single long and slightly wheezing sigh.
Quiet fell, and she tucked her feet back up again. Not up on the railing this time, but up on the chair with his shirt wrapped around her knees and her arms around them, hugging them tight to her body. Dropping her forehead onto them, she looked like she was praying.
He thought maybe that wasn't such a bad idea at all. That maybe a little prayer...
Then she lifted her head. She stared straight at him, her eyes too-bright in the gleam from the candle, too shiny and too glittery.
He motioned with a finger, pointing at the bottle. "Drink up."
"If you think there's enough wine in the world..."
"Probably not. I can tell you from experience there's not. But it takes some of the edge off. For a little while."
She hesitated.
"Go ahead. Suck it down right from the bottle if you want. You were right about doing that in the first place, and I was just..."
Surprised?
Hell, he'd never seen a woman drink chardonnay straight from the bottle the way she had. It had opened up a whole new world of possibilities, a whole new world of probabilities.
JoJo hesitated a minute more, then slowly unwrapped one of her arms from around herself. Slowly, her hand brushing the back of his arm with a casual touch that felt like electricity slamming all the way through his body...like energizing fire promising things were going to be okay if he'd just give them half a chance, things were definitely looking up now...she smiled at him. Picked up the bottle, and in one of those weird moments where time seemed to switch into freeze-frame mode so that it took forever to accomplish the next part, lifted it to her lips and drank.
Drank long, hard, and deep.
"I'm sorry," she said again, very softly, turning that too-bright gaze to him.
"There's no reason for you to be sorry." He bent forward, closer to her. Close enough that he could smell the scent of her. Sweet, drifting, heat-charged scent. "You got me to talk. You gave me the chance I needed, to get it off my chest. I should be thanking you. I should be down on the floor, kissing your feet, and..." Impulsively, he slid from his chair. Dropped to his knees on the tiled floor in front of her. But he didn't kiss her feet. After a moment's hesitation, after he gave the idea that much consideration and no more, he parted her legs instead. Spread them far, far apart, as far as they would go so that he could lean forward and in, licking his lips a little to relieve their parched and burning dryness, and then he placed, deliberately and slowly, a line of the tiniest, trailing kisses imaginable on the inner curve of her thigh.
His first kiss shot a tingle through her. A tingle that penetrated, deadly and accurate, all the way into her and through her, making her shiver despite the suddenly unbearable intensity of the heat pressing down on the open balcony.
It had been a long day. Longer than long, a day charged with such terrible and overwhelming emotions that she could only wonder how Miles could kneel before her now, apparently so unaffected, kissing lazy and burning paths along the quivering flesh of her thigh. Kissing his way closer and closer to the center of her, as if nothing had ever...
You came along the other day with your silly-ass goddamned love charm. That one phrase from all the things he'd said to her earlier floated back to her, making her shiver again. Harder.
Of all the things to remember. Of all the things to think might possibly, even in this weird and distorted dream state brought on by too much wine, too much runaway emotion, too much of the touch that slid closer now, deliciously closer to the one place where she wanted more than anything to be touched...
"You're cold?" Miles asked softly. "How could you possibly be cold when it's so..."
Hot.
The word hung trembling, dancing, dangling in the air between her thighs. Air that was, indeed, too hot to be borne. Too hot to be survived. Unless...quickly...
In that long and slow, languorous and hovering hush, JoJo held her breath.
It seemed to take a very long time...an incredibly, painfully, inordinately immense amount of time...for his mouth to find what it sought. To brush lightly against the eager, swollen and aching flesh between her legs...flesh that had waited too long, far too long for this caress. This searing, sweet, devastating and debilitating hint of a caress.
Looking down, looking at the jet-dark head poised between her widespread and all-but-useless legs, she begged him silently, begged him with every bit of thought she could muster. Begged him to hurry.
For God's sake, hurry!
But he didn't. If anything, he only seemed to take longer as he moved with diabolical slowness to take the pleading folds of her flesh between his lips and begin to suckle. Tenderly. Raptly. It seemed to take so long, and yet the wave of desire that thundered through her, rocketing twice as large and twice as bright as any Chinese New Year's fireworks finale, came so fast. Hit her so hard that when he murmured something, softly, she had the utmost difficulty hearing his voice over the sudden roar of the flame on the thick white candle that still flickered atop its massive brass stick in the corner. Had difficulty concentrating on anything now but the soft and fluid tendrils of sheer, writhing agony that had overtaken her and filled her, and were just about to pull her down into the depths of some deep abyss that waited, darker even, and more encompassing than the lightless city that neither knew nor cared what was about to happen on this shadowed balcony. Couldn't hear anything except the slow and rolling throb of her heart...or was it the tide of her own sudden, onrushing sexuality?...in her ears. Even the never-ending sounds of the street rising from far below, muted somehow by the darkness but still distinct, ceased to exist.
"You..." He paused long enough between strokes, between the devastating and pillaging slashes of his tongue seeking out the deepest recesses of her flesh, to murmur one small word at a time. "Are..."
"Miles..." she needed to say something. Needed to do something, needed to...before she began to scream. "I'm what?"
Once she began to scream, she knew she'd never stop. Never want to stop.
"Sweet." He pulled his mouth away from her then, exposing her superheated folds to night air that suddenly did feel cooler by comparison. To the nonexistent breeze that nevertheless seemed to flick across them, as effective at arousing as any touch of his meandering tongue could ever be. "So sweet that I never thought...never dreamed...
"Miles, please?"
"Please what?"
She hesitated, then breathed out a long and wavering sigh that should have answered his question. That did answer it, if only he had the wits to listen.
"You know."
"Do I?" His frown was a fake. She knew it, and she knew he was aware that she knew. "Why don't you tell me? Please what?"
Giving up because he wasn't going to cooperate, wasn't going to give her the satisfaction of even appearing to cooperate, she slumped back in her chair, her head dropping back to loll against her shoulders. Dazed, dizzy, chilled and delighted to the marrow in the hovering heat, too weak to move, if only to tug at his hair and force his mouth back to where it had been, where she so desperately wanted it to return, she wondered where this was going to go. Wondered how it could go any farther, when already she felt the rising swell of release within her. Felt it readying itself to break and leave her drained. Too drained to ever...
"Please." The word shuddered from her throat. "Take me. Fuck me."
"I want to." His tongue fluttered across her open and exposed flesh again. Playing with the entrance, taunting it with promises of things he might do, things he could do, he did none of them. He only laughed, in a way that sent another of those curling, fluid chills of agony through her, making her feel again the deep-down warning stir of a climax soon to come. A climax that hovered in the immediate future like a coiled and waiting thing.
"I don't know what you've done to me." Miles paused again. Ran that soft, that deliriously, deliciously, wet and enticing tongue very deliberately across her. "But you've sure as hell done something. You've..."
"With my silly-ass love charm, you mean?" She couldn't believe the sound of her own voice. It was a whisper. Barely a whisper. Not even a quiver, stolen from her lips by a passing, faint breath of wind that caught it and tossed it over the railing into the simmering blackness beyond, only to be lost forever.
"Or whatever the hell you want to call it," he mused between short bursts of attention to the flesh that only, with each and every burst, craved more. Craved deeper, and harder, and more.
"I told you," Gasping, she stopped again to try to control herself. Control the impulse that had her wanting to grab him and toss him to the orange-tiled balcony floor, and then to..."I...think...it was...the right time. I was...and you were..."
"I wasn't ready for something like this, Jo. I wasn't ever going to be ready again."
"But like you..." She wasn't going to be able to take much more of this. She'd gone far, far beyond being able to take anything more. "...say. People are...wired that way. You must have..." She had to break off for good then, because his mouth had returned to her. His tongue had begun to seek out what it would no longer be denied, in seeming confirmation that he had indeed been ready. More than ready.
For a minute, five minutes, five hours, he probed. Nibbled. Sampled, and suckled, with that same infuriating, astounding, lack of urgency that was...in another minute...going to drive her completely, irreversibly insane.
"Incredible," he murmured between calescent strokes before the tip of his guileless and lazy tongue wandered back inside.
JoJo bit back the groan that would tell him, in no uncertain terms she was ready for anything. Anything he might choose to give.
"You've...done...something," he said again, staring up at her with his dark brows drawn slightly together in a frown, a strange and sultry warmth rising in his eyes just as JoJo felt it rising within her. "You gave me a choice."
She remembered.
How could she forget the fear, the agony, when she thought he'd chosen to leave her for good?
"You gave me a choice," he insisted at the end of that long and delicious stretch. "And now that I've made it..." His mouth closed around her. His tongue slipped far, far into her for the most miniscule of seconds. "Now that I've made that choice..." He found the nub. That one sweet, delectable, killing place buried so far inside her that it was a miracle he'd ever managed to find it at all...the one single place that gave him every power over her, every bit of control and every bit of freedom to bend her to his will.
He'd found it, and he seemed entirely prepared to use it.
"Miles?"
Laughter. Soft. Suggestive. "What?"
"Make l...love to me?" And with that, she found the strength to move her arms at last. She grabbed his shoulders, both of them, with tightly-clawed hands and tried to drag him away from her, tried even as his mouth found a softly-plunging rhythm that would eventually, that had to, drive her straight to the edge and shove her over.
Moving up to her, pressing his mouth right up against her, Miles chuckled. His breath burned against her as that low and soft sound made her awaken suddenly, in at least a dozen ways she'd never been awakened before. His laughter was so soft against her flesh, and so pleasant. It was so agreeable...so...damn it, so plain, downright sexy...
For a moment she thought he was going to ignore the plea she'd dredged up from the depths of utter, scalding torment. She thought the scream, the one she'd been fighting desperately to hold back, was going to erupt. And then it did. A thin and wavering column of sound drifted from her lips. It wandered into the living room and, attracted by the movement of pale curtains billowing slightly inward and away from the open patio door, lost itself in that yawning and unfathomable cavern.
While her mind spiraled away, wandering off on its own, along steaming and fantastical paths built entirely of her body's hungering thirst for him, Miles got to his feet. Dimly, she heard a metal chair scoot with small shrieking and grating noises across the tiled floor. Then she felt Miles pulling her up. She felt him moving even closer to her, pressing his body to hers, moving her back against the wall next to the patio door because that was the only way...the only one...she was ever going to stay on her feet.
"Miles?" Confused, dazed, she tried to resist. She tried hard, but not hard enough.
With both of his hands...enormous hands, enormously strong hands...now holding her waist, his fingers almost meeting at front and back, he was too strong for her. Too strong, even when she was at her best. When she had her wits about her and the desire to defend herself by making a stand for herself. But now...
The concrete wall felt cool against her back. Incredibly cool and so refreshing it seemed to draw her out of the moment, out of her trance and out of herself. It was cool for a moment. Only for a moment, and no more. Because no sooner had she touched it, no sooner thought how wonderful its coolness felt against the lightweight cotton that separated her bare skin from the relief of it, than her touch heated it to the same seething, fevered temperature as her body.
Miles came to her then.
Not laughing, not smiling, he came to her. Placing his hands on her shoulders, catching them with his palms, he pressed his hips against hers to steady her. He made sure she was going to remain on her feet before he moved a hand away and ran it beneath the loose-fitting shirt that flowed around her, dwarfing her with its size, falling almost to her knees to cover her without really covering anything at all. JoJo gasped when he touched the tenderized skin at the outside of her thigh, then began the slow, inevitable and implacable journey around to the inside, and what awaited him there.
She had no choice now but to look either at the sculpted planes of his bare chest and the heavenly swirl of dark-as-midnight hair that filled its very center, or up and into his eyes.
She chose his eyes.
They shone. Like they'd never shone before, with a sparkle that lay buried deep beneath, which might have been there all along, undetected and undetectable, but which had begun to escape, so much closer to the surface that it was undeniable now. That it begged her silently to finish what she'd started and give him all that she'd ever promised.
He was large. Twice the size of any man she'd ever known. Twice, in every way that counted, she thought as the hard and swollen ridge of his shaft stirred between them.
Leaning forward, Miles kissed her and she replied, her mouth caressing his, her tongue stroking his and inviting it to continue. Inviting him to continue.
And he accepted. Meeting her kiss head on, he brushed his hips back and forth across her in ways that could only inflame and anger, could only cause the pressure...sweet and deadly pressure, like none she'd ever known...to build, and build, and build. JoJo felt herself grow tight with a need that was every bit the equal of his, every bit as intense and inescapable and insatiable as the long and taut ridge of him pressed harder against her, pressed her against the warming concrete. She felt it begin to reach. To search and to throb. Felt it prepare itself to begin its delirious conquest.
Her body changed in that moment. It grew softer and more moist, as it readied itself for what was by now a foregone conclusion.
Tiptoeing to meet his height, she brushed her mouth against his, very lightly. And that was all it took. That was more than it took.
"You gave me a choice," he murmured, his hand finding the buttons of the shirt and opening them, his fingertips grazing the skin at the point of her shoulder as he shoved it back, and then trailing wandering, wondering starbursts of fire over her arms as he eased them free of it. All the while he never hesitated or faltered in the motion he'd begun, sweeping his hips around and across, brushing them repeatedly against her. "You gave me a choice. And now it's your turn. You have every right to refuse."
Had his knee not urged itself between her thighs to support her against the wall, she felt sure her legs would have crumpled, dumping her to a limp and useless pile at his feet. Or maybe they had crumpled. This entire scene, this entire, black-velvet moment had taken on all the qualities of a dream. Maybe she had collapsed. Maybe she really was sprawled at his feet, swallowed up and lost in the opium dream of the contact between her body and his. She gasped as his hand reached for her. As it found the tenderest bit of flesh at her opening, the one that had long-since prepared itself in anticipation of his inevitable arrival, and began to stroke. Gently and tenderly, tenderly and teasingly, nowhere near the opening that needed so desperately to be stroked in just that way. Deft, barely moving, his fingers drew repeatedly, perilously near the place that needed them the most, only to pull back again at the last minute without ever satisfying. Without even promising to satisfy. "But if you're going to refuse, Jo, you have to do it soon, because..."
"And if I do? If I refuse?"
The pressure he exerted, the intensity and insistence of his slow, circling and tantalizing caresses, increased. "Are you saying you want to refuse?"
JoJo shivered. She'd have to be superhuman to do such a thing. And she wasn't superhuman. Not the last time she'd looked, anyway. Shuddering, wishing for something she could grip, some way she could steady herself and keep herself in possession of her senses, she closed her eyes. "I don't know...what...I want."
"You say that. But..." His mouth had moved close to her ear. His weight shifted slightly, never leaving her entirely, as he removed his jeans and slid them down over his hips. As he stepped free of them and only them, releasing the shaft that immediately sought its place in her. His breath burned hot against her earlobe and the whorls of flesh above. Brushing against her, his mouth served to increase the temperature of the languid, motionless air on the balcony by a hundred degrees. A thousand. A hundred-thousand.
"But what?" Searching, seeking, her hands found his shoulders and clung to them, steadying her at the same time she kept him a part of her.
He laughed softly, stroking her again. "But your body tells me something different."
"It...does?"
Laughter again, steaming against the top of her ear. "Yes, it does."
"And what...wh...what...does my body...tell you?"
He moved again. Very, very slowly, the tip of his erection beginning to brush at the part of her body that wanted him the most.
"Your body, my love..." Slowly, finding the exact millimeter of flesh it had sought, his shaft entered her. It separated the folds of her and slipped inside silently. Swiftly. Easily. Without regard for pending refusals, possible denials, or possible...anything. It simply entered. As if it had some inalienable right to be there and always had. "Your body tells me refusal is the very last thing on your mind."
She was riding him now. Her feet were no longer touching the floor, her weight balanced on and controlled by that one single, dominating bit of flesh that had pressed itself so irrevocably deep into her. She was riding him, being first lowered to the floor so that her feet almost, almost, had the chance to touch and re-gain their control, but then gently, inexorably, being lifted again with a smooth flex-and-relax of the muscles in Miles's body. She was riding him, and she was barely conscious, barely lucid as all sensation seemed to slip away from her. All sensation except what she felt there. Where he moved with his maddening, careless strokes and circles. And what she felt in the nipple he suddenly caught between his teeth, only to coax with those same faint and flicking tongue-strokes that had already worked such magic on other parts of her body.
JoJo cried out as her already-hard nipple hardened even more. As it soared to new heights and new limits of desperation. "Oh, dear God, Miles!" Somehow, she managed to lift her hands. Managed, swimming against a tide that had started to rise inside her and already threatened to swamp her and carry her to sure and certain doom, to find the silken dark tumble of hair at the back of his head and to grip. Twining her fingers deep into and around the roots, she tightened her grip. Tightened and relaxed, alternately and repeatedly. Caressing and tugging, tugging and pulling, and always, always holding him close.
Miles groaned a little, too. Opening his mouth wider, opening it all the way, he surrounded the tip of her breast with the greedy, softer-than-soft warmth that never failed to amaze, no matter how he chose to employ it. Somewhere deep in his throat he laughed. The sound sent a fresh shiver, one JoJo could no longer mistake for anything but the purest, most demon-driven and powerful of desires, shafting through her.
Pressed tight against the hardness of his chest, a hardness that failed utterly to match the incredible rigidity of the shaft he used to support her, she closed her eyes and opened her mouth. "Oh, God. Oh, Miles." She struggled and writhed, willing her body to move deeper onto him though of course deeper was impossible. Deeper had already been accomplished, and so she willed herself to find and claim the release he seemed to deny her so deliberately, with such enjoyment of the denial. She willed but could not succeed.
The angle at which he'd pinned her to the wall, the way he forced her to ride helplessly, her feet dangling as he began to pump back and forth and up and down inside her, made it impossible to do anything but lean back with her balance dependent upon cooling concrete at her back and the broad and unflinching shoulders beneath her hands.
"And now?"
"Now?" His mouth moved close to her ear again. Perilously close.
"Do you believe now?" She shivered. Shuddered. Felt her heart stop with a single, stuttering jerk, then felt it start again. "Do you believe in...really believe in...love charms? I mean really, deep deep down in your soul of souls?"
"You're here," he replied, his voice hushed and his hands moving across her hips as he helped to steady her so he could gain better control, freer entry. "And I'm here. Whether you know it or not, what's happening here, what's happening now, is a miracle. A genuine, true-blue, dyed-in-the-wool miracle."
"I don't bel..." Gasp. Shudder. Writhe in agony. "...believe in mir...acles."
Another laugh. Softer. More excruciating than any of the laughs that had come before. "Neither did I." His eyes shone. Beautiful eyes, so close to hers that she could see the naked look of longing mixed with his need to believe at any cost, at all costs.
"Miles?"
"What?"
Hands on his shoulders, she squeezed. Held on tight and gasped again as his slow and steady rhythm took on a new urgency. A new promise. "You...I...please?" Held aloft by the shaft that impaled, pinned, pilloried, and wouldn't give up, she could do nothing else. Nothing but plead with him. Nothing but struggle, weakened by the rising tide of surrender, to maneuver herself. To use the wall at her back, exerting more of that superhuman strength and a dexterity that went far, far beyond the merely superhuman to push off against it in a way that seemed to defy gravity and a half-dozen laws of physics, so she could capture him. So she could wrap herself around the greedy shaft, tighten around it relentlessly, and refuse to let him go unless...until...she held herself on him. Slipped herself off him and then back on with one long, single, smooth and gliding caress. Revelled in the velvety flesh of him, at the way it tried to clutch at her and draw her back in. Deeper and deeper. Inescapably deeper.
"Christ," he groaned, and that was all he said. Though there was a lot more...a whole hell of a lot more she sensed he'd have liked to say.
"What are you thinking?" Concerned, she stroked the side of his face with an unsteady hand. "Why are you frowning?"
"I wasn't...thinking..." The pressure he exerted inside her increased suddenly. Out of control and beyond her wildest expectation. "God, Jo..." He made a small sound, one she couldn't interpret, and his body stiffened.
So did hers, and together they jerked, movement matching movement. Shudder matching shudder, and desperate rippling of flesh matching desperate rippling of the flesh buried so deep inside her.
"Jo..." he murmured, his lips brushing the top, the side, and finally the tender lobe of her ear as he eased her down. As he released her and allowed her to slide along the wall until she collapsed to the cool tiled floor.
Dimly, because his brain had ceased to function with any kind of dependability back there when he'd first touched the wet and pulsing flesh between her legs, Miles felt the thud of impact as her body collapsed, and his joined it no more than a fraction of a millisecond later. He felt the concussion, felt itself transmit itself through his back and into his ass and every other part of him though he remained strangely unaffected by it, strangely and mysteriously unaware of the pain that had to be coursing through him.
JoJo did that to him. Every time. She had a knack of stealing his breath away just when he needed it, of leaving him completely stunned and utterly defenseless with his entire mind and body turned so upside-down and inside-out that he knew he'd never manage to straighten it out again and didn't even care. She energized him. She drew him into the center of her miraculous, writhing, demanding, soothing whirl of moisture. Wrapped herself around him and pulled him down. All the way down, until he was completely lost, hopelessly trapped, in gold-infused fog that had no beginning and seemed, likewise, to have no end.
And he wouldn't have it any other way. Wouldn't. No matter what.
On that thought, and in that instant, as he moved to cover her body with his, as he slipped a knee between her legs and urged them to spread so he could join with her and make himself a part of her again and forever, this time, JoJo proved him right. Unquestionably and undeniably right.
Wrapping her arms around his neck, she gazed up at him with slightly-quizzical, slightly-challenging eyes. One corner of her mouth had turned up the slightest bit, twisting in a way that seemed to dare him...dare him to go ahead with what he'd planned.
That was one dare he intended to take. Though for just a second, time seemed to want to defy him. Time seemed to literally stand still.
In that endless and pulsing second, Miles felt something happen to him. Felt something happen to and in the warm, motionless air around him. He felt it, and thought he almost heard it too, a faint but unmistakable click of something slipping back into place. Of some gear, too long and too brutally dislocated, dropping back into its proper position and then, slowly, revving up with an uncertainty borne of long disuse. He felt something surge with life. Something outside himself and separate from himself, yet something that was as integral a part of him as his heart, or his lungs, or the cock that had been impressed enough by this moment of breathless strangeness that it ceased, however briefly, its search for what it would very soon claim.
Miles felt something wonderful. Something sweet with a rightness he'd never expected to know again in this life.
He would never be the same person he'd once been. That was impossible, and he knew it. Knew, too, he didn't necessarily want to be that person. But maybe, with JoJo's help he could become someone else. Someone new and untainted by the agonies of the past. Someone stronger. Better. Wiser.
That gear he'd felt dropping back into place just now...that was another chance. Maybe the last new chance he'd get in his lifetime. And he knew, with a certainty that was frightening because of all that it implied and all that it promised, that he wasn't going to turn his back on it. Especially not now, when JoJo lay beneath him with the tip of his shaft pressed against the gateway to the enveloping warmth that was her. Not when she was in need, her body beginning to move softly, seductively with that need. Not when she'd lifted her arms and her legs to stroke him and caress him with the strength of her longing pouring from her.
This was more than he'd bargained for. It was more than he'd ever dared to hope for and more than he'd ever expected to find.
It was everything he'd wanted, everything he'd feared, everything he'd dreamed.
JoJo caught his shoulders with her small and strangely-uncoordinated hands. Struggling a little, no longer seeming entirely capable of gripping, much less of directing their movement, she nonetheless tried to pull him closer onto her and into her. Urging him toward the wet and sweet depths he wanted to plumb, she breathed hard in short and raspy sobs that felt like the cruelest, harshest strokes of a whip against raw and injured flesh. Her body shook beneath his. Then it strove. Her hips lifted, and she pressed her face tight against his shoulder so that every one of those gasping breaths tried to scorch a hole straight through his skin. A soft, almost misty stream of moisture burst from her body in the instant it touched and then surrounded his parched and aching flesh.
Miles thought his heart would stop. He waited for it to stop. Waited a quarter, a half, of a second.
Then, and only then, moving slowly and meaning to take his own sweet time for the anticipation and savoring, for the exploration and delight, he pulled back to brush the tip of himself across her opening again, then around it, then back across.
She pulsed. Actually, physically pulsed beneath him. Seeming almost to turn suddenly, wickedly cannibalistic, the soft flesh between her thighs seemed actually to lunge for him, trying to grab him and trying to pull him straight to eternal imprisonment and doom in the heart of the fiercely scalding cauldron of her.
Gasping, shocked, he pulled back. But if he'd thought he would avoid this terrifying new form of slavery until he'd got himself good and ready to accept it, he was too late.
JoJo had already caught his hips. Small and determined fingertips dug deep into the flesh of his ass. Deep enough to leave him permanently marked and bruised, branded for all time with small, dark marks that would forever proclaim her victory over him, her mastery of him, her possession of him. Pulling again, bringing him to her with a strength that amazed, frightened, and left his throat too dry and stiff to swallow, she plunged him into the ravenous heat he'd sought.
She groaned, but he couldn't. His throat had locked itself too tight. Had locked in all possibility of sound.
He could only do as she commanded. Could only slam himself into her repeatedly, urged on in the attack by the long legs and dexterous feet that flexed around him, doubling the intensity of each and every thrust. He could only work at her, his mind gone, replaced by a formless mush that knew one desire and one only.
To fuck.
And fuck, and fuck, and fuck.
To fuck her until he died trying to fuck her. And even that wouldn't be enough. Even that wouldn't come close to satisfying him or saving him. He was hers now to use and abuse, hers to command and cajole. Hers in every way it was possible for a man to belong in his body and his heart and his soul to a woman.
He was hers. But he fought desperately, with all the valor and strength left to him, to wrest control back from her and make her his.
Somehow, thrusting with the full strength of his feet against uneven Spanish tiles, twisting with the last strength remaining in thigh muscles that had little more substance now than water, he managed to reverse their positions. Managed to roll over and take her, still locked tightly to him and straining at him, with him. Managed to place her on top of him, seated deliciously and perfectly on him, still writhing on him and tightened around him.
Somehow, he managed to find enough breath to speak. "Make love to me, Jo. And don't ever stop." And then he thought he was going to die.
Make love to me.
Good God almighty, he hadn't heard that right! Couldn't have heard it right, because he couldn't have said it. But he must have, because his cock had reacted instantly, explosively, with an enormous and bucking upward thrust that set it to howling with a fury that could end only with an equally explosive release.
He wanted to cry. Thought maybe he was going to cry, whether he wanted JoJo to see him cry, or not. Because he wasn't ready to make that kind of commitment. Not now. Maybe not ever.
Commitment was dangerous. It was...
But then he said it again, the words slipping out before he could stop them. "Make love to me. Mad and passionate love." And Christ in heaven, he'd said it in complete honesty. With so much meaning, staring at her with enormous eyes that had to...quickly, he backed away from that notion. He'd said it from the heart. And how could he...who the hell was he to...deny what came from the heart?
"Christ, Jo. I never expected..."
Reaching out with a hand that wasn't steady, that seemed for a minute unlikely ever to actually capture the side of her face, he somehow did. Captured it and steadied it, his palm so sweat-slicked that when she leaned forward, balanced precariously on the knee she used to support herself, her tits swaying slightly, hypnotically in time with the punishing rhythm of her plunging and retreating hips, it seemed she must surely slip and fall right down on top of him.
She gazed back at him for the longest of moments, her expression unreadable though her eyes once again seemed to question. Searching every inch, every plane and protrusion and crevasse of his face, she seemed to want something from him. Something he had no clue how to give.
Then her eyes brightened. She reached for the hair on his chest and curled her fingers into it. Pulled on it a very little and tugged, the ever-changing but never-ceasing pressures sending all kinds of indescribable little shock waves through him. She tilted her head back and arched her lovely body in a tight, spectacular bow of sheer and unadulterated joy that thrust her tits forward. Chin up, her eyes gazing at the underside of the balcony on the floor above, she laughed. It was a small and gleeful sound. A sound of absolute certainty in herself, in him, in them together.
She laughed, and his cock, already overwhelmed by a heat it hadn't anticipated and couldn't control, gave the mightiest surge he'd ever known. It surged so hard and so forcefully that he felt it had dragged his ass physically and completely up off the hard, cool surface upon which he lay. It surged, bucked, and drove him ever more violently upward, brutally into her even as she descended straight down, onto him.
Riding him, she laughed.
There was a word old Mrs. Butters, his music teacher, had used about a million years ago back in Connecticut, when he'd gone under protest to her small and fusty cottage every Tuesday evening for his weekly piano lesson.
Glissando.
To slide up and down the musical scale. To slide smoothly and rapidly, without pause or faltering, without doubt or hesitation or fear. Most of all, without fear.
Gritting his teeth, Miles thrust again. Forcing his hips to rise even when his body had begun to feel incapable of the strength it took to rise, he met her and slipped sllrepeatedly, effortlessly, deep into her every time she dropped onto him. His hips and her body worked in tandem now. They worked swiftly, diligently, in perfect unison aimed at finishing both of them off for good.
Funny. Mrs. Butters had given him the perfect word to describe what JoJo was doing to him right now. The perfect word to describe those smooth and sinuous motions when she settled herself more firmly on top of him. When she used the strength of her legs to lift herself up and off again, and when she curled her toes and her feet beneath him so that she could exert pressure against the lowest curve of his ass and use the leverage to urge him even deeper...so blissfully, painfully deep into moist folds that welcomed him with the most intoxicating and all-encompassing punishment he'd ever known.
JoJo made him feel at home in ways he'd thought he would never felt at home.
Glissando.
He'd never been much of a music student. Doubted he could play a goddamned do-re-mi on the ancient sea-green upright that still filled a corner of the downstairs hallway in the Connecticut house. He'd hated the lessons, hated being forced to take them, hated being forced to endure the teasing of his friends, who'd thought piano lessons 'sissified' and hadn't missed an opportunity to taunt him. He'd hated old Mrs. Butters, too, with her shortbread cookies and her crocheted doilies and the million-and-one simpering and leering goddamned china shepherdesses that had, frankly, creeped the living shit right out of him.
But he should call the old lady. He should tell her about the amazing thing she'd done for him, about the unexpected gift she'd just given him. He should thank her for making all of it, all of this, possible.
"God, " Miles groaned, breathless. "You've got to...Jo, I don't know if I'm strong enough to..."
"What?" She laughed softly, and this time it was an evil laugh. One that filled his mind and drove all other thoughts away. That started a whole slew of all-new and thoroughly unnerving cravings inside him.
"I don't know if I can take this. I don't know if I'm up to the..."
"Seems to me," she murmured in a low and husky voice that only set him to aching as she continued to work over him, as the pressure he felt inside continued to mount, "that you really don't have to do anything at all." With that, she bent forward almost double in a way no human being should ever rightly be able to bend herself double, and touched her lips to his. At the same time, her tits brushed his chest, stroking it with liquid fire that sent stabbing, unendurable pains from his nipples all the way through him.
He managed to reach. Managed to catch one of those glistening, sweat-and-passion-dewed orbs, and brush his fingertips across it. But that was all he managed, for in the next second his body unleashed a silent and tormented scream that, had it been real, would have made the last functioning remnants of the blacked-out city below screech to a grinding and uncomprehending, horrified halt.
JoJo lifted herself again and dropped back as if she meant to skewer herself upon him. The asolutely, indescribably perfect glissando of her body stroked itself along his, but she was tiring. He felt her slowing a little. Her legs had ceased their violent contractions and had slipped into a muscle-deep, bone-deep quivering. The rest of her body trembled, too. Noticeably, its grip easing around him.
She was tiring. She was nearing the end, but she held on with a tenacity he couldn't believe, a reckless tenacity he admired. She held on, and she kissed him repeatedly. Kissed him deliriously, her mouth always finding his and always surrounding it so that she could devour. So that she could demand more. Always and forever, more and more and more.
God, no one had ever kissed him like this before. No one had ever put everything into it, or focused everything on such a sweeter-than-sweet contact that grew hot, then immediately hotter still. So greedily, hungrily hot that the kiss seemed to singe his flesh and leave him thirsting, aching to be completely set on fire.
Her body, already moist and ready, continued to moisten. By leaps and bounds, or sometimes merely by slow degrees, the moisture built inside her. Built and overflowed, built and overflowed. And all the while, he sensed there was something more. Something that waited for him to...
A mighty spasm twisted through his cock. His lungs emptied themselves with a small whimper. His heart hitched, seized, hitched, and then finally, almost too late, began to beat again. And his mind spun.
He heard her calling his name. Heard her crying it out, over and over and over again as she poured forth all the essence she had, more than he'd ever imagined she could possibly have, over him. But he was aware of her cries only at the most marginal level because his body had begun to empty itself, too. Pumping in enormous, convulsing waves, it drained itself, returning every ounce of what she gave him.
He emptied himself into her, his breath sobbing in the back of his throat. Emptied and emptied, and in the end wished he had more to give, even long after it became obvious there was nothing more.
Not ready for this to be the end...not yet...Miles laughed softly, just the way she'd laughed at him such a short time before. Catching her hips between his hands, he added the very last of his strength to hers, still searching for something deep down inside himself with which to fill her even further. He lifted her and pulled her onto him and then, when she was firmly and unshakably seated, rotated his hips in search of the one perfect, one inarguable angle that would give him a little more time and would make her surrender and be unquestionably his for all time.
Relaxing suddenly, JoJo gave up the fight. The collapse came with no warning, with only a slight shudder as her body expended itself in one final and absolute burst of moist heat. She fell forward, against him and on top of him. Wrapping smoother-than-satin arms around his shoulders, she sighed a little, as softly as she'd shuddered, and then she lay completely still with him still buried inside her, still locked to her as if he would never, ever, allow himself to be unlocked.
Moaning, he lifted leaden-heavy arms and held her there.
She was the softest thing he'd ever felt. Softer than the softest. She was the whisper of the sea on the earliest mornings along the Connecticut beach. She was the silken-satin perfume of his mother's honeysuckle, drenched by the warming rain of summer as it faded memories of winter away to nothing. She was a soft and drifting cloud of afternoon heat rising from the sand as he walked endlessly and without purpose. She was warmth enveloping him and chasing away memories that had hurt too much for far too long.
She was the only thing, the only person, who could soothe away that pain. She was his ray of the brightest hope, the most delicate, eternal and blush-colored hope in a world that most of the time these days seemed to have gone right, straight, unquestionably to hell.
When she was with him...when she was on him...he felt nothing could ever harm him again. He felt protected. Safe.
The city had emptied itself during the night as they'd slept on the tile-floored balcony curled beneath a thin sheet, the cool tile draining the excess heat from their exhausted and overworked bodies.
The workers had fled. In cars, some of them, or clinging to the backs of trucks and vans, but many of them...a staggering majority...had walked, clogging streets and bridges in their determination to get out and get away.
According to the disembodied voice on Miles's small battery-powered radio, they had been orderly. Calm. There had been little violence, or looting, little shouting or shoving. With instincts honed by the disasters on the day the twin towers had collapsed, with instincts still tuned by practice so heart-wrenchingly not forgotten, they'd taken time to help each other rather than hurt, and in the end had simply left. And the tourists, most of them chased from their hotel rooms by managements concerned for their safety, were too tired and lethargic after a long night spent wandering lightless streets and darkened squares to do more than roost in whatever places they had found.
It seemed like the perfect time, Miles had said, to do the one thing he'd avoided above all else for far too long. The perfect time to come to the pit where the towers had once stood.
At first, JoJo hadn't known what to say...had actually been afraid to speak, and break the haunted, hesitant silence that surrounded the enormous, inconceivable and gaping tear in the earth. A hush, Miles told her, that had lingered there from the instant the last, tiniest particle of dust fell and the sky had cleared. Pressed up against the rough fence, shoulder to shoulder with others, just as quiet, she'd only been able to look down and then occasionally up, to check on Miles.
She watched him carefully at first, worried he might have another episode, almost certain he would. So far, he appeared to be all right, but she squinted a little, wishing she could be sure. His face seemed set in stone...not brooding, or frowning, or mournful. Not anything but sadly thoughtful, his lower lip caught between his teeth, his gaze fixed on some faraway point at the center of the yawning pit. Some point JoJo did not, could not possibly, see. She'd watched him for the longest time until he'd snapped suddenly out of that musing trance and, with some small comment about haunted streets, pulled her out of hers.
"It's not..." Subsiding back into silence, she stood pressed against the rough board fence, staring down once again.
"Not what?" His voice, like hers and everyone else's, was hushed. Subdued.
She thought for a minute about what she wanted to say and how best to say it, then shrugged without ever turning her gaze to him. "Not as big. I've noticed that about New York. All week. Nothing's seemed as big when I get right up close to it as it seems on TV. Rockefeller Center? A postage stamp. Herald Square? Almost nonexistent."
Looking down at her, he smiled. It was a small and crooked expression, but definitely a smile. "They say the camera adds ten pounds. Maybe it's the same with places. Maybe they look bigger, too. I never noticed. Never really thought about it." But, hell, he thought, staring almost as transfixed as all the silent tourists at the place where buildings had once stood, where his life had once been, and had so nearly ended, she was right. It didn't look big enough. Not for what had happened here. It could never be big enough for something like that.
It amazed him that he was here at all. This had been a place to avoid. Religiously. Deliberately. A place he'd thought he would never come back to, never even come near. That hadn't been all that hard to do, since without a job there hadn't been any reason to come to this part of town. Until today. Until he'd realized that JoJo had without even knowing it forced him to stare one debilitating fear in the face and conquer it. Until he'd realized it was time to make a break with all the fears.
"And you're okay with this." She looked up at him, for the fortieth or fiftieth time since they'd arrived.
"Okay?" He sighed. "I don't think 'okay' is a word that's ever going to apply. Better, maybe. But...it's going to take a long time to get over it, Jo."
"You never will, you know."
And hell, she was right about that, too. She'd been right about a lot of things, and he thought if he'd just keep his mouth shut and listen to her, she'd be right about a lot more. If he could convince her to stay. If he could somehow find the words to tell her how much he loved her. How much he needed her. How much he...
"I just wish I understood." Looking back down into the pit, JoJo looked terribly, terribly sad. Looked almost on the verge of tears. That wasn't a good thing, because she'd been the strength he'd leaned on in the past five minutes, or ten, or however the hell long they'd stood there shoulder to shoulder, staring in silence. She'd been the only strength he'd had, and if she started to cry...
Miles shuddered. He didn't even want to think about what he might do if she started to cry. "That makes you and me and a few hundred million other people who will never understand," he murmured, moving around to stand behind her and pull her back against him so he could draw some badly-needed strength...and courage...from her.
"Some things just..." Her voice broke. "If only there was something I could do, or say, to..."
"You've already helped," he murmured, his hands tightening around her arms. "Yesterday. When you dragged me kicking and screaming, up that goddamned building."
She looked around and up at him. "You weren't exactly kicking and screaming on the way up. That was on the way down."
He squeezed tighter. "You know what I mean. That helped, Jo. More than you know. 'Cause it got me to thinking, and that got me to...well, I'm here, aren't I? Someplace I swore never to come again, someplace that all the shrinks or all the counselors in the world couldn't get me to come."
Looking down at her, he saw the sadness return to her eyes and expression and wished like hell he could do something to chase it away. Permanently. But, hell. He'd barely been able to make things right for himself...settle his own accounts. So how could he expect to do it for anybody else? Still... "Thanks for agreeing to do this," he said quietly, pulling her closer into the place at his side where just recently, amazingly, she'd begun to fit with a perfection that dazzled his mind. "Thanks for agreeing to...when I could just as well have gone berserk here as I did yesterday." He looked back down into the pit. "You're right about a lot of things, Jo. You're right not to understand. Because I don't, either. I'll never understand how a woman with green eyes and black hair...or a balding guy with a pot-belly and a laugh so contagious you couldn't help but laugh when he did, or a thin guy who resembled Abraham Lincoln and had a mortgage that would choke a cow...could simply walk into their offices on a bright summer day, sit down and answer the phone, and just disappear. Right into nothingness."
JoJo turned away at last. Turned to face him. "Your friends?"
Feeling the old look of grim-eyed determination, of hanging onto what was left of his sanity with no more than a fingernail, settle over his face, Miles nodded. "Friends. Co-workers. Just gone. I don't understand how that could happen, and I don't believe I ever will." He lowered his head. Slowly. Feeling like that simple motion took more strength than he'd ever possessed. Lowered it, so he could look straight into worried, beautiful brown eyes. "You're good for me. Do you know that?"
She lifted a hand to brush back runaway strands of brown hair. "You barely know me."
Then he really did want to laugh. In a way he hadn't laughed in a very, very long time. But this didn't seem to be the right place for booming laughter, any more than it was the right place for booming voices. "I think I know you pretty damned well by now," he contradicted, his arm finding her waist again and urging her to walk away with him. Just walk away, without a second glance at anything.
"But you don't really know me," she insisted. "You don't know the first thing about my past, or..."
"Do you have one?" The farther they walked the more his spirits began to lighten. Amazing, that lightness. Like none he'd ever felt before. Or had he? A long time ago? When he was a kid, maybe, in Connecticut?
She scowled. "Everybody has a past, Miles."
God, he loved her. He thought...knew...he'd loved her for a long time now. As long a time as two days and a few hours could be. He loved her so much he thought his heart would explode with it. That he'd never be able to live another second if she wasn't right there where she was now. Right by his side, his breath of fresh air. Something he'd needed, something he'd...
"And what about Times Square?" she demanded suddenly and from out of nowhere.
Mystified, he frowned. "What about it?"
"Well, in the first place, it's not square..."
His frown dissolved into a laugh. One so filled with lightness it startled him, so badly that he bit it back before it had much of a chance to get started. "I have no clue why that is, Jo. It's just not, and that's something you're going to have to live with."
"And how the hell do they fit so many people in there on New Year's Eve? Because that place is small!"
"Don't ask me," he said, allowing a little bit of the disconcerting laughter to seep through, this time. "I wouldn't get involved in that lunacy for all the money in the world."
"Where are we going now?" she asked as they approached the Hummer.
He shrugged. "Wherever you want. There's the Statue of Liberty. Everybody should see that. Every tourist should make the trip out there to get ripped off for a souvenir or two."
Pulling away from him, pulling away from his arm that had encircled her, she leaned back against the front fender and gazed up at him with brown eyes full of laughter. And God, how he missed the swaying, seductive little movements of her hips as she'd bumped against him with every step. Missed it so badly it almost took his breath away. "You were the one getting ripped off yesterday," she pointed out. "You were doing all the buying, and if you remember, I had better sense. I was trying to stop you, and...Jesus God, Miles...sixty dollars for a Christmas ornament?"
"I was in the middle of an anxiety attack," he replied. "Sue me."
"I should say you were!"
"So. If you don't want to get ripped off at the Statue of Liberty, we could go to Ellis Island. We could take the boat out there. Take our time, find a quiet place where we can talk. Because we need to talk, Jo. About a lot of things. We need to..."
"If it's all the same to you," she said, her voice turning suddenly subdued as she stopped looking at him, "I think I'd rather save it for later. The Statue, and Ellis Island, and...all the rest of it."
"Are you sure?"
She nodded. "I've had enough for one day. And you have, too. We can do those things some other time. Tomorrow. Or the day after."
Miles's heart banged out a wild rhythm in his throat. The wildest, the most uncontrolled, the most anxious he'd ever felt. Ever. Touching her chin lightly with two fingers, he urged it to lift, refusing to allow it not to lift. And finally, at last, she looked up at him with enormous, moist eyes that did nothing at all to settle the untamed pounding that in another minute was for by-God-sure going to explode his poor, suffering heart right out of his chest. "What are you saying to me, Jo?"
"That I lo..." Her face colored and, unable to lower her chin or look away, she closed her eyes and shrugged. "That I'll be here tomorrow?" She shrugged again. "That there's no way I'm going to leave now, and I think I'll be here for a long time? That there will be plenty of chances to...that I never really intended to go home at all when I came here, and you've only given me a reason to...?"
God, his heart. His poor, poor heart. It was in trouble now. Serious, serious trouble.
"You need to call your parents," he said and had the shit nearly startled out of him when the words came out so cool, so calm and collected that even he wouldn't have known by listening that everything had gone all haywire deep down inside him. "You need to let them know you've been..." His voice might have been the sound of pure and rational reason, but his laugh was soft again, and suggestive. "Detained."
"I didn't tell them when I was coming home," she hedged. "I took two weeks off, planning to...I don't know."
"Cover your tracks?" he suggested, tipping his head a little so he could murmur right into her ear.
She shivered. Sighed. Wrapped her arms around herself, and didn't answer right away. And that was okay with him. That was just fine and dandy. Because he needed a few seconds, himself, to enjoy the hot burst of delight that started out whispering through him and then quickly escalated into a blast of roaring summer thunder.
"I'm...avoiding them," she replied at last, looking like she hated to be backed into such a corner, but could see no way to get around it. "Avoiding telling them anything right now. All right?"
"I don't know." His lips grazed the top of her ear, and it was his turn to shiver at the faint touch and all the images it called forth...sweet images, intense images, never-to-be-forgotten images...of JoJo in a carriage in moonlit darkness. In a wide and soft bed, saturated with sleep and intertwined in him, a part of him. On a balcony with the feeble light of a candle the only sign of life in a vast and limitless darkness that had pulsated with the knowledge...make that the suspicion...
Something else began to pulsate then. Down between his legs, where pulsating pressures could lead to one, and only one, very delicious outcome. "This very, very wise lady once told me avoidance isn't an answer to anything," he murmured.
"A wise lady, huh?"
His insides quaked when he nibbled softly on her ear, unaware of or unconcerned by anyone or anything in the street around them. "I think she has some kind of connection in Chinatown. I seem to remember something about this old woman with a table full of..."
"You're impossible." JoJo wriggled a little and those first, promising hints of delight to come sparked into something more. "I hope you know that, Miles."
"My mother used to say so all the time."
For the longest time they stood, arms around each other, gazing into each others' eyes like a couple of new lovers...which they were, he realized with something of a shock.
Lovers.
And how the devil had that happened? When had it happened?
"But you do have to call them," he insisted, wanting desperately to kiss her, even if her expression did turn instantly, immediately, to a scowl.
"I know." She tried to pull away from him. But he didn't let her.
"Not so fast," he growled and did kiss her. Really, really kissed her, with all the desperation of a man who hadn't kissed or been kissed in a dozen years. In his entire life. Tongue mingling with hers and stroking hers, he kissed her as if he'd never been kissed at all and had waited all his life for this chance. This moment. "Mmmmmm," he murmured, his lips never leaving hers.
"Mmmmm-hmmmm," she agreed. "So, what are we going to do?" she inquired, breathless, when he finally allowed her to speak. "Go back to the apartment?"
"Power's still out," he murmured, brushing his lips across hers, barely able to refrain from brushing something else across her. Something that had grown enormous and pleading, something that demanded to be brushed soon. Or else. "Do you really want to walk up thirty-one flights of stairs? 'Cause I'm here to tell you..." Another brush of lips, another deep and scalding kiss. "I'm not in any mood for a workout." Another laugh. A wildly seductive one, now. "At least, not for that kind of workout."
"Well, we have to go somewhere." Incredibly, she lifted her knee. Very casually, as if she'd only meant to prop it up in front of her, her foot on the Hummer in a relaxed pose.
But he knew better. Oh, sweet Christ, did he know better! Her knee grazed his crotch. Her knee just barely grazed it, but the result was explosive. Beyond explosive. If he wasn't careful, he was going to come right here. Right now, in the middle of the street, in the middle of a milling crowd.
"Well, then." Smiling down at her, knowing his eyes had to be filled with everything he felt for her, knowing she had to see a marvelous sparkle that had never been a part of them...or him...before, hoping she did see and understand, Miles lifted her hand to his mouth. Fingers tightening as they wrapped around hers, he pressed a long, long and lingering kiss to the palm of her hand. "There's always Connecticut. We could go to the house in Connecticut." If, God help him, he could last that long.
"Connecticut." Her voice was quivery. It was shivery, and shaky, and every bit as unsteady and stunned as he felt. "Just like that?"
"I've got the keys." Another kiss to her palm, another tremor deep down at the roots of him.
"Just get in the..." She gasped a little as his kiss began to travel up her arm, to the bend of her elbow. "Just get in the car and go? Just like th...that?"
"Just like that." He'd made his way to her shoulder. To the little, finely-rounded bone right at the point of it, and the sunlit skin that dared him to go on, go all the way to...
"Without clothes, or...or anything?"
He laughed. Leaned forward, so he could nuzzle the side of her neck and drink in the fragrance of her.
Honeysuckle. Just like in Connecticut. She'd like Connecticut. He felt sure of it. And he'd like to be with her in Connecticut.
"Who needs clothes, Jo?"
She blushed a beautiful, brilliant red. "We have to...I mean, we can't just...all the time..."
"Fine. Then we'll pick up whatever we need along the way. Or once we get there."
"And if the p...power's out? If Connecticut is..."
"Who cares? Jo, it's a two-story house. And we did fine without power last night. More than fine. We..." He shuddered as his cock began to twitch. Dangerously. "Look. Are you going to keep dodging the subject, or are you going to answer me? Would you like to go to Connecticut with me? Right now, right this minute, without stopping to think about it, or overanalyze it, or...?"
"You really wouldn't mind?"
Bewildered, he shook his head. "Why on earth would I mind? Why would I ask, if I minded?"
"I thought..." She shrugged again. "You always talk about it like it's someplace special, just to you. I didn't want to intrude. But if you're serious..."
He nibbled at her ear again in preparation for the final assault on the lips that waited, beckoning. "Would I have asked if I wasn't serious?"
She sighed. Shivered. And bent closer so that he could nuzzle and nibble more easily. "Then, yes. That would be nice. I'd like to see Connecticut. See your house, and the seashore, and..."
Miles's breath caught in his throat. His heart missed a beat. His gut tightened, and everything just south of it...his cock, and his balls, and the muscles in his thighs...tightened, too. "Connecticut it is, then," he said. "And that other thing?"
Tossing her hair back from her eyes with a brisk gesture that went straight to his heart and made it contract with the delight of having her and knowing he wasn't going to lose her, she frowned a little. "What other thing?"
"What you started to say back there. You know." He brushed a quick kiss across the very edge of her jaw. "Just a minute or two ago, when you almost said you..."
She turned her head a little so that long before he was ready, long, long before, his lips touched hers. "I'll tell you in Connecticut," she promised. "Just as soon as I have a little time to pull my...thoughts together."
"Your thoughts," he murmured as his lips skipped lightly across hers again, "Or other things?"
"Oh, all kinds of things," she responded with a shaky laugh. And as his mouth descended over hers, firmly this time, he thought of the house that awaited them. The house where he'd grown up. The one with the big bedroom overlooking the ocean...the bedroom that had once been his parents', but was his now. All his. Of the outrageously ornate carved four-poster bed where he'd spent so many happy hours cuddled down between his father and his mother, their arms enfolding him, listening as they told him fantastic stories he'd never quite believed but never wanted to dis-believe, either. Stories of mythical creatures and far-off places. Stories designed to lull him to sleep so his dad could carry him back to his own bed in the smaller room across the hall...that equally-secure and happy place with the Bozo The Clown nightlight on duty to hold all the evils of the world at bay.
And he knew, beyond any question or any doubt, that the happiest hours of his life were yet to be spent in that bed. With his wife...with JoJo and a flock of sons and daughters, God willing, of his own. Sons and daughters to whom he'd tell fantastic stories before he carried them to their beds in the late, late evenings.
About The Author
A native of a small town not far from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Evelyn Starr always had a passion for the glamorous, the exotic, the sensuous. And she's always been willing to travel the world in search of them. Among her favorite places are Boldt's Castle in the Thousand Islands, Tasmania, Australia's tropical Queensland, and all the nooks and crannies of the Rocky Mountains she now calls home.
Like her wanderlust, Evelyn's fascination with words and stories began at an early age. She remembers being able to read and write before she started school, and by the time she'd finished first grade, she was writing her own little one-page stories. Following graduation from high school, she left her small-town home and hasn't looked back. She majored in journalism, romance, and adventure, and eventually married her college sweetheart, who remains the most romantic, and the most adventurous, hero of them all.

