Mr. Personality (16 page)

Trailing his hand along her inner leg from thigh to ankle, he sent shivers through Nicole, his words soft and lush in her ears. Max reached down, dragging a finger over her collar bone and down the valley between her breasts, sending a sizzle along her skin.

“Your breasts are beautiful. Perfectly full and round. They move ever so slightly when you walk. A tiny little bounce despite your bra. Pink nipples,” he murmured as he gazed down at her in her bra and panties, “so eagerly erect.”

Her one leg still resting upraised against his chest, he leaned forward a little, brushing his thumbs over her nipples where they pressed hard against her bra.

“I’ve often wondered what you would do if I walked up behind you while you worked and just gently cupped your breasts in my hands. I’d like to massage your nipples till you moan.”

A jolt went through her, the image adding fire to the pleasure from his touch where he stroked her.

“If you worked naked, I could walk in and fondle you whenever my thoughts of you made me hard. I could kneel between your knees and suckle your breasts. Then we could make love right there.” He paused, his breath hard. “You make me so hard, so crazy for you.”

Insane,
she thought, the breath in her lungs expanding. She drove him out of his usual reality and made him insane.

“So pale,” he murmured, rocking his pelvis against her. “So beautiful. I need….”

Max pressed his open mouth against her leg in a soft, hot kiss, his fingers worrying the pebble of her nipple through the satin of her bra.

“God, I need you.” His hands shifting to her panties, he eased them off her hips and up, over her legs, left propped on his shoulders. “I need you so much.”

Lying on her back looking up at him, his short, dark hair soft where her foot lie against it, he seemed all-consuming, his eyes avid on her body, his hands sliding, smoothing, stroking over her flesh.

“So perfect,” he muttered, cupping her through her bra. His hands slid lower, bracketing her rib cage. “Such delicate bones, your skin so right under my hand. If a man didn’t believe in God, he would after seeing you.”

His words flooded over her like music to her heart. Aware of his erection pressing evocatively through his trousers, tempting against her naked bottom, she wriggled, aching to be filled.

Hot and damp against her inner leg, he kissed her as he drew a finger along her sensitive cleft.

“Ahhh.” The air deserted her lungs and she reached for him to draw him closer.

Almost immediately, his hands went to his belt, loosening it. With an economy of movement, he unzipped his pants, pausing only to take a condom from his pocket before he let them fall to the floor.

The tiny sound of paper tearing and a quick movement of his hands and he was there, pressing into her heat.

“God, you’re so tight. So hot,” he uttered in a strangled voice, his head thrown back as he eased himself into her, her ankles still resting on his shoulders.

Her muscles easing gloriously to accommodate him, she sighed, as he sank hilt-deep into her body. He paused, as if to gather himself, his breath harsh in the air between them. Lying dazed, impaled by his thick member, she trembled as ripples of pleasure rolled over her.

“So incredibly good,” he muttered, before slowly pulling back. “My God, Nicole. I’ve…never…felt anything…so good as…you around me.”

Bracketing his hands around her hips, he set a firm, steady rhythm and slowly drove Nicole out of her mind. Her hands clutching the sheets of the bed, she welcomed his every intrusion with soft cries, her body flooded with sensation. Filled with him, she could only submit to the fire raging through her body.

“Nicole,” Max muttered. “Oh, better. So much better…than anything….”

The tide rising within her, submerging thought, with a roaring in her ears, she felt the explosion coming and gave herself over to it. The world disappearing into a vortex of hot, black, jagged pleasure, she felt Max swell inside her and heard his triumphant shout as a piercing cry was wrenched from her.

As if her soul tumbled within her, spinning and bouncing gloriously over the most powerful, sluicing sensation, she yielded to it, locked in Max’s arms.

* * *

It was still dark outside when the phone rang. Max tried to ignore the shrill sound, reveling in Nicole’s sensual nakedness all curled to him. Being tangled together like this with her breathtaking body felt so damned good. His whole body felt amazing.

Ring!

The pillows muffled the sound some, but, annoyed, Max found himself lifting his head to squint at the intrusive device on the small table next to the head of the bed.

Ring!

“Damn.” The clouds of sleep still curling through his brain, he reached for the receiver, pressing his thumb against the “talk” button.

His fingers tight around the receiver, he ignored her, the reality of what he’d done slamming into him as he came fully to his senses. He’d gone to that damned banquet and fucked things up with Pete even further. Then, to make matters worse, he’d gone and slept with Nicole, his muse. With the telephone receiver, clenched in his hand, already, hell was breaking loose.

“Is this Max?” the stranger asked more aggressively, the faintest note of caution at the end of her question.

“Who is this?” he barked into the phone, conscious of Nicole sitting up in the bed beside him.

God, why did he keep letting his dick lead him into messes?

The morning chill from the air conditioner swirling around him, he tried to block out his screaming thoughts and get a grip on the situation facing him.

“My name is Claire Abbott,” the woman told him. “I’m Nicole Cavanaugh’s best friend and she didn’t call me last night.”

“So you think she’s here?” he demanded. “Maybe she got busy. She’s in New York City, for God’s sake. She probably found something else to do besides call—“

“She calls me every night since she’s been working for you,” the woman said bluntly. “Every night.”

“Oh.” Turning wordlessly, he handed the phone to Nicole.

CHAPTER NINE

Fourteen hours later, Nicole stood in the office doorway of Max’s apartment looking down the hall towards the stairs. She knew Max was up there, sitting in his window on the landing between the floor where she stood and the upper loft where they’d discovered passion. Identifying his physical location was sure a hell of a lot easier than figuring out where his head was.

What the hell had she done, getting romantically involved with a man so tangled up inside himself? She’d worked with troubled masculinity before. She knew the risks and still she’d walked into this…whatever it was.

From the moment she and Max been awakened by Claire’s anxious call, he’d become a stranger to her.

What the heck was going on with him? Normally, he was silent and walled-off, but at least he was usually
there
behind his cool, cynical eyes.

Hell, she’d have preferred him to have snapped at her and he hadn’t, even when she’d given him reason, and she’d given him plenty in the last few hours.

Her frustration rising at his lack of response, she’d even sunk to the level of taking verbal pokes at him drinking coffee. She’d given him crap for drinking the coffee she’d brought him, for heaven’s sake.
Everyone
drank coffee, didn’t they? Except for the strong and healthful few?

But when she’d climbed the stairs before lunch and commented snidely that she’d heard people who had a problem with depression shouldn’t drink coffee, Max had hardly blinked.

Leaning her head against the polished wooden doorway, Nicole wondered desperately what to do. It wasn’t that she saw depression on Max’s face. In contrast to the passion of the previous evening, he displayed
no
emotion now, but all her sensors told her a war raged inside the man who’d become her lover.

The silence inside the apartment seemed thick and woolly. Even the streets outside were weirdly noiseless, but not as quiet as the staircase where he sat.

Max knew she was down there watching him as he scratched out a word on his legal pad. Even with his face turned away from the steps as he sat in his window seat, he still felt her presence as if he had radar. Down the stairs, along the short hall, leaning against the door frame, she looked at him with frustrated, anxious eyes. He knew she was there despite his refusal to turn and look her way. His dazed mind struggling with the colossal stupidity of sleeping with her, it seemed still that he could smell her perfume.

He knew the exact moment he’d realized the foolishness of relying on emotion to get him anything in life.

At the age of twelve, he’d huddled in a classroom in a musty building at Yale, his eyes wet after a harsh telephone conversation with his parents.

Leaning his head back, he endured the replay of the defining moment when he’d first concluded that his parents didn’t love him. Couldn’t love him. Refusing to indulge in maudlin reflection, Max reminded himself that neither Richard or Susan Tucker had given the appearance of knowing how to love anyone. Not even their selves.

“Are you crazy?” his mother had asked. “We scrimp and save and struggle to find scholarships for you to attend Yale and you want to come home after two weeks?”
“Mom,” he’d said in a shaken, small-boy voice. “I’m homesick. It’s weird being here. Everyone else is so much older. Can’t I come home?”

“After we went to the trouble to find people for you to live with?” his father had said incredulously from the phone extension. “You have a good set-up there, living in the Moncriefs’ house. It’s not like we put you in a dorm.”

No matter that the Moncriefs, though decent people, were complete strangers to him.

As his parents spoke, Max had felt himself shrinking inside, his pain and loneliness pulling away from his rational acknowledgment of what they were saying. Like drying clay separating from the mold, his emotions tightened and grew hard.

After ending the phone call, he’d gone on to class. It was what he’d always done and he found comfort in the calm disconnect from his distress. But that one day, he’d stayed seated in the classroom after the other students had gathered their book bags and headed out to the next class.

As he sat at a desk, his head empty of thought, his heart in limbo, the professor of his class had come up to him.

“Hey, how’re you doing, Max? Are you getting along okay?”

Max had respected Jim Leyton. At the surprising age of twenty-eight he’d earned a position teaching at a highly-esteemed university.

That day though, Professor Leyton had seemed distracted in class. No less involved in his topic of symbolism in English literature, he’d evidenced none of his usual wry humor, his narrow face unusually serious. When Max, to his shame, had grown wet-eyed in response to his teacher’s kind question, Jim Leyton had sat down and talked with him.

Despising his weakness, Max had talked about his loneliness, his longing to return home. To a kid, even a home as barren of comfort as his had been was still home.

Sitting next to him, Leyton hadn’t attempted anything awkward like hugging him or telling him he would be okay. He just listened and, finally, he said, “I know you’re missing being at home with your friends and your family, but I think your parents did right in sending you here.”

Max had looked at him, struggling with embarrassment for giving way to his feelings in front of a man he respected.

“Your parents may seem uncaring…” Jim Leyton had paused, “but truthfully, Max, you need to value the power of the mind over everything else. The heart is under the sway of emotion and therefore, unreliable. But your mind will always be a place of serenity.”

His words were spoken with such simple power. Max had known he was right. Emotion let you down. Only the power of the mind could be relied on.

Looking back, Max could see that Leyton had needed comfort that day almost as much as he had. Rumors had subsequently swirled about a divorce and a beautiful wife who hadn’t wanted to be a professor’s wife and had found someone else.

Whatever the man’s story, his words that day had taken root Max’s consciousness, underscoring his disappointment with his parents and their failure to respond to his distress.

From that moment on, he’d had stopped wondering why his family wasn’t closer, why his parents seemed to have no joy in being with their sons, only in pushing them toward academic success. His moment of realization had been crystal clear, complete and encompassing.

So why was he now acting like a fool? He’d thought he learned his lesson. Emotion had screwed him over repeatedly.
Feeling good
with a woman didn’t mean anything. So what the hell was he doing with Nicole?

It was crazy insane. Hadn’t he learned anything about the stupidity of blindly following his dick?

But all he wanted to do was trail down the stairs, traverse the hall and gather her into his arms. He must be having some sort of psychotic break, a form of altered reality. He didn’t even feel like himself, dammit. He wasn’t the kind of guy who cuddled! It was bizarre and more than a little scary.

He had a fucking deadline to meet! He had to get this book finished and she was apparently part of the process. He
needed her
to complete this project. Sure as hell, sex wasn’t as important as his work! Without question, he
was
his work.