“You didn’t have fun yesterday afternoon?”
“I’m not talking about that.”
“Inviting your lover up to your bedroom in the middle of a workday qualifies as wild and crazy.”
“Even if I’ve known him most of my life?”
“Ah, but you haven’t known him like this. Making love with someone allows us to strip away the veneer of civilization and behave like the animals we truly are.”
“It does?”
“Oh, sweetheart, you haven’t lived until you’ve heard a man growl.” She smiled. “Wear those undies and invite him to rip ’em off.”
“I appreciate the thought, but I can’t see myself wearing?—”
“Think about it. As some wise person said,you’ll end up regretting the things you didn’t do more than the things you did.” She stood. “You have another client out there. I can hear Ethel bending his ear. I’d better go rescue him.”
Tracy left her chair and went around to give her a hug. “Thanks, Auntie Kat. I will think about it.”
“That’s all I ask.” She whisked out the door, greeting both people in the outer office as if she’d run into the King and Queen of England.
Tucking the velvet bag in a desk drawer, Tracy walked to the outer office and welcomed her next client, a man who was paying her to research a property line dispute. She had bad news for him. His neighbor was in the right.
Explaining it used up most of the hour, but the guy took it well. After he left, she made a quick sandwich upstairs and brought it down so she could check out some websites Adam had mentioned that had info on the lynx pair.
His text had been brief and professional. She wasn’t sure why. No one would ever see it but her. He could have added a cute emoji. Prior to their New Year’s Eve kiss-a-thon, he would have.
Okay, she got it. He’d thrown out some comments yesterday that he probably regretted, like wanting to run away with her and his recent discovery that he looked forward to having kids. He’d overcorrected by sending a businesslike text.
He really didn’t know how to conduct a fling that was all about sex. Neither did she. But obviously Auntie Kat did. She’d driven men to such lengths that they’d growled in a fit of primitive passion.
Abandoning her research on Canadian lynx, she carried the velvet bag upstairs along with her empty sandwich plate. After sticking the plate in the dishwasher, she walked into herbedroom. Good thing she had a good supply of sheets since she’d decided to change them again this morning.
She’d turned down the bed in preparation, but she’d left the blinds open the same as they’d been yesterday. Although making love in daylight had been fun, it hadn’t led to lustful growling. She closed the blinds on both windows and turned her bedside lamps to the lowest setting.
Better, but still not what she’d call seductive. She needed to drape them with something. Years ago she’d read about covering lamps with silk scarves to produce a sexy glow. She didn’t have any.
But she had some red napkins she used at Christmas. Good thing she had eight, because she ended up using a binder clip to hold four together. Then the light was too dim, so she turned it up to high. Aha. Her bedroom looked like a bordello. Perfect.
She made it downstairs for her one o’clock and managed to wrap up a quit-claim deed issue in forty-five minutes. That gave her time to get out of her clothes and into the black lace bits of nothing that she fully believed would come apart with the slightest tug. She had to be careful not to start the processor prematurely.
Climbing slowly into bed, she propped pillows against the headboard, leaned back and waited. At precisely two, the bell on the office door jingled.
“Adam?”
“It’s me.” The lock clicked and his boots hit the stairs, going fast.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The contract shoved in his back pocket, his jacket over his shoulder and his hat in his hand, Adam took the stairs two at a time. He hadn’t slept much as Luis’s words had echoed in his head.
As dawn broke, he’d come to a decision. Luis was right. He and Tracy were in love with each other, body and soul. His instincts when she’d kissed him on New Year’s Eve had been correct.
In that moment, he hadn’t worried that she was on the rebound. He hadn’t dug into his past to find evidence that he’d wanted her all along. He’d been ready to accept that they were right for each other.
But the lack of a condom had taken the wind out of his sails. He’d left, giving himself time to think, to doubt, to reject his gut reaction to Tracy’s all-in kiss.
Ever since then, except for rare moments when he was making love to her, he’d let his head be in control. He’d played it cozy, played it safe, managed to convince himself this wasn’t what he’d thought on New Year’s Eve.
