Stevie gauged his reaction with trepidation, but there was nothing glowing in his hazel eyes except admiration and desire. His tanned fingers curved around her paler skin, cupping her breast. His expression grew as soft as the flesh he was gently supporting.
But Stevie didn't see that. By now her eyes were closed, and, between parted lips, her breath rushed in and out on shallow pants. Judd nuzzled the breast he held, rubbing it with his nose, his chin, his lips, lightly scratching it with his bearded cheeks. Stevie murmured with want and need, and responsively pressed her thigh against his, tilting her hips up and forward.
He kissed the very center of her breast, then took it between his lips and drew it into his mouth. After suckling her with tempered fervency, he kissed her raised nipple. He flicked it rapidly and lightly with the tip of his tongue.
Sensations exploded in her belly like holiday sparklers. She gave a glad, wordless cry. Judd pressed her femininity with his knee and made a grinding motion against it. She clutched his back, digging into the hard muscles.
He sent his hand beneath the sheet, beneath the nightgown, beneath the brief silk panties to caress softness and warmth and woman.
That's when they heard the knocking on the door downstairs, urgent knocking that couldn't be ignored.
The first words with which Judd greeted the new day were precise and profane.
He practically tore the front door off the hinges getting it open. A sodden delivery man, wearing a dripping yellow slicker, didn't look any happier to be there than Judd was to have him there.
"Took you long enough," the man complained.
"I was in bed."
"Hope you appreciate me coming all the way out here in this." He indicated the downpour that had made a quagmire of the clearing surrounding the house. Stevie's valiant little plants were lying vanquished in the mud like victims of a sea battle.
'Oh, yeah, I'm thrilled to see you," Judd mumbled sarcastically as he scrawled his signature along the dotted line of the receipt.
The delivery man handed him the plastic-wrapped overnight letter, hunkered deeper into his slicker and ran down the porch steps to his waiting van. Judd slammed the front door.
"Who was it?" 'A delivery for me.''
"From whom?"
In his querulous mood, he hadn't even thought to check. When he read the return address, he cursed. "Mike Ramsey."
"What is it?"
"How the hell do I know? I haven't opened it. yet."
He'd never been this frustrated in his life.
There they'd been, in that cozy, rumpled bed, kissing like crazy, temperatures rising, things progressing nicely, and now this. He could gladly murder Ramsey for unwittingly interrupting.
He was none too pleased to see that Stevie had quickly dressed. Her eyes looked enormous in her wan face, her expression a blend of apprehension and guilt.
Damn! He still had the taste of her mouth and the feel of her breast on his tongue. Even as enraged as he was over the interruption, all he could really think about was resuming where they'd left off.
But instinct told him that it wasn't going to happen. That's why he was so angry. Given a chance to think about it, to reconsider, to let her passions cool, she had backed out.
There was always an outside chance, however, that he was wrong, Judd thought optimistically.
He took a step toward her where she stood poised, as though for flight, on the bottom stair.
He looked at her longingly and spoke her name in a hoarse, aroused voice. "Stevie?"
Wetting her lips nervously, she said, "I'll put on the coffee," and headed toward the kitchen at a pace that could fairly be classified as a run.
Judd waited to follow her until he'd exhausted his repertoire of obscenities. Having spent a majority of his adult life either in a locker room or newsroom, that file cabinet of his vocabulary was extensive.
Wearing only the shorts he'd pulled on before going downstairs to answer the door, he went into the kitchen. Flopping into a chair at the table, he ripped open the cardboard envelope while Stevie stood waiting for the coffee to finish perking.
Judd read the one-page, single-spaced, typed letter, then balled it up and stuffed it into the pocket of his shorts. "How long before that coffee is ready?"
"A few more minutes. What did your editor say?"
"Nothing of importance."
"Then why are you looking so surly?"
"Because I haven't had my coffee yet." He sounded testy even to his own ears. But it wasn't Stevie he was aggravated with. It was Ramsey, the situation, his aroused body that refused to relax. "There are other more…pressing reasons for my crankiness, but I don't think you really want to hear the details, do you?"
She gave a quick, negative shake of her head.
'I didn't think so," he said in an undertone.
'Is Mr. Ramsey begging now? Is he as low as a slug and groveling?"
"No."
"Then what does he have to say?"
"Not much."
"What's in the letter?"
Her outcry took him by surprise. Shifting his attention from his straining sex to her, he saw that she was drawn up as tight as a high-octave piano wire and obviously none too pleased with his reticence. "Alright, you guessed. The letter was about you."
The instant he confirmed it, she dropped into the chair opposite his. "What did he say?"
"He informed me that you are missing," he said with a wry smile. "He told me that I was losing out on the hottest sports story so far this year. All any sports fan is talking about these days is Stevie Corbett's mysterious disappearance following her collapse at Lobo Blanco."
The light on the percolator blinked on, indicating that the coffee was ready. Stevie hadn't noticed it, so he got up. Returning to the table with two steaming mugs, he set one down in front of her and sipped at his own before continuing.
"Mike urged, strongly urged, that I stop pouting and come back to work immediately. He says that with my network of sources, I should be able to track you down before anybody else gets warm." Smiling into his steaming mug, he added, "He seems to have conveniently forgotten that he fired me."
"What are they saying?"
"Who?"
"All the sportswriters. Surely there've been theories on my disappearance."
"Ah, let's see, Mike mentioned something about suicide and-"
"Suicide?"
"That's one rumor, yes, but since your body hasn't been found…" He shrugged. "Another hypothesis is that you're secretly hospitalized somewhere. And there's been mention of an exclusive and revolutionary cancer treatment center in the Bahamas. I've been instructed to forget my novel for the moment and find out which guess about the 'Corbett broad'-and that's a quote-is right."
"He knows about your novel?"
"I've mentioned it off and on."
She had hit the nail on the head during their shouting match the night before. For years he had been telling anybody who would listen about this terrific sports novel he was going to write someday. But someday had just never got around to happening.
Until now. It was here. After many false starts over the years, he was finally into the novel and loving every minute of it. It was gut-wrenching, head-splitting, nerve-racking, ego-deflating work, but the prospect of having to set it aside indefinitely was unappealing.
On the other hand, he had financial obligations – like his expensive European car-that his checking account could cover for about another two weeks, and that was stretching it. He had to make a living to support his writing habit.
The solution to his problem was sitting across his grandma's oak table.
He was right on top of a hot sports story that he could sell to the highest bidder. With that nice, fat nest egg to fall back on, he could kiss Ramsey and the Tribune column goodbye, at least temporarily, and work full-time on the book he had to expunge from his system whether or not it was ever published.