Sandra Hill (18 page)

She pulled the sheet over her head. You’d think she’d be able to sleep after her sleepless night. No way! Her nerves were shot.

Crunch, crunch, crunch!

Meanwhile, Ferrama was so darn blasé about this mortifying turn of events that she wanted to shake him.

Crunch, crunch, crunch!

Or stuff the box of Lucky Krisps down his throat.

Crunch, crunch, crunch!

She was not a person used to sitting by idly, waiting for things to happen. It frustrated her to no end that she’d lost control of her life. She remembered one time when a guy took her sailing on a date. It was the most miserable day of her life, wasting an entire afternoon waiting for the wind to push the boat. If she could have, she would have jumped into the lake and pushed the boat herself.

Crunch, crunch, crunch!

She sat up abruptly, sheet shoulder high, to glare at him. “Do something, dammit!”

Surprised, he jerked his head to look at her, taking in her modest pose with the sheet. A slow grin crept across his lips, and she knew…she just knew…the sheet was invisible to his twinkling eyes. With a groan of dismay, she drew her knees up to her chest.

“Were you talking to me?” he asked politely.
Were you watching me?

“No, I wasn’t watching you.”
Damn, they should outlaw that grin of his. It’s a lethal weapon
.

At first, he cocked his head in confusion. Then he grinned wider, almost as if he could read her mind. She could have sworn he murmured, “Bang-bang.”

“Don’t just sit there,” she snapped, annoyed as much at herself and her straying eyes as at his failure to do anything to solve their dilemma.

“You want me to stand?” he asked.
That’s the first intelligent suggestion she’s made today. And, man, am I glad to oblige. What do you say, Peter?

“No, I don’t want you to stand, you dolt,” she said in a rush. “I want you to stop chomping on that cereal. I want you to come up with a plan. I want you to get us out of this madhouse.”
I want you
.

His eyes went wide, then slowly seemed to turn from midnight blue to smoldering black. “I want you, too, baby.”
Rev up the engines, Peter. It looks like we’re off to the strawberry patch after all
.

“The only fruit you’re going to eat is those blasted blueberries.”

“I like blueberries,” he said defensively.
I like raspberries even better, though. What I’d like to suck are those raspberry nipples of yours. Come on, baby, flash me again. Let’s make horizontal fruit salad
.

“I do not have raspberry…body parts.” Her face flushed hotly.
I knew it. My nipples are too big. He noticed. I wish I could melt into the mattress and disappear
.

“Raspberry…?” He frowned with puzzlement. “Hey, I didn’t say that out loud. Are you reading my mind?” Before she had a chance to react to that astounding accusation, he added, “And you know damn well your breasts are gorgeous.”

“I never said anything about…I mean, I never said anything
out loud
about—”

It hit them both at the same time. “The third phase!”

After that, their thoughts went haywire, ripping back and forth with total abandon.

I want to make love with her so bad
.

I’ve never wanted a man like I want him
.

She is so damn beautiful. If she only knew what effect she has on me, she’d sure as hell use it against me
.

His eyelashes are so incredibly long and silky for a man. I get aroused just looking at his eyelashes. Amazing!

Her breasts are magnificent. I’d like to lick those hard peaks till she screams. And screams. And screams
.

Look at his lips. No, don’t look. They’re full and sensual and firm. I wonder if he’d like to kiss for a really long time. Kiss, that’s all
.

I would
.

In the end, it was Cynthia who this time opted
for a cold bath. As she clanked off to the bathroom, sheet wrapped around her, mummy-style, she heard the prince think.

Great ass!

Life didn’t get any worse than this.

By Sunday afternoon, he and Cynthia had been through more phases than the moon in all its lunar cycles. They were both feeling a little loony.

Well, Elmer should be back by this evening, and the rock ’n’ roll matchmaker was going to get a resounding welcome into the twilight zone. The interfering fairy was going to see stars—and he didn’t mean music celebrity stars.

Cynthia thought the worst of the phases had been seeing each other naked, but he disagreed. He’d gotten a whole lot of enjoyment out of that one. Who knew a woman could blush on so many body parts? Or that there were fifty ways to view a swaying butt?

Nope, in P.T.’s opinion the worst of the
phases had been the one where he kept blurting out Elvis long songs, serenading Cynthia like a lovestruck idiot. Not that he hadn’t been good. Hell, he’d impressed even himself with the authenticity of his husky croon, accompanied by a cute grin that was uptilted on one side (with a little practice, he might even add it to his look repertoire in the future), and, of course, a few Elvis bumps and grinds. His pièce de résistance (although Cynthia was still resisting) was a down-on-the-knees, arms outstretched wail of burning love. At one point he’d seriously contemplated,
out loud, for God’s sake
, the possibility of growing sideburns.
Geesh!

He would have been mortified except for one thing. At the same time he’d been belting out “Stuck on You” while he ate a peanut butter and banana sandwich, or urging Cynthia to “Please Surrender” as he chain-danced her around the room, or proclaiming with alarming crudity “It’s Now or Never” to a tone-deaf Peter, Cynthia had been making an equally ludicrous display of herself.

She’d turned into the sexpot Ann-Margret…a regular dynamo of dancing, flirting energy. Flicking her wild strawberry-blond mane over her shoulder movie starlet style, she’d given him sultry, half-lidded, come-hither looks, and danced up a storm in showgirl fashion straight from the movie
Viva Las Vegas
.

He’d gotten to see a whole lot more of her magnificent figure during that phase
(Thank
you, God!)
while she’d bent and contorted and flung her body about in Ruth’s spandex dress. For some reason, she hadn’t appreciated his observation that she’d make a good stripper if she lost her Wall Street job for good.

P.T. made a mental note to suggest to advertising that in one of the print layouts for “Naughty or Nice,” a red stiletto heel, the shoe should be worn with a bimbo dress just like this. Or maybe with nothing at all. Hmmm. For certain, he was going to insist that the model have strawberry blond hair.

He glanced over to the bed where Cynthia was curled up, kitten-style, and decided to share that thought with her. “You know what would look good on you?”

She was just awakening from a nap. They did a lot of napping in between phases of Elmer’s spells. There was nothing else to do but sleep, if you didn’t count watching Elvis and Cinderella videos or listening to Elvis and Cinderella music or taking bubble baths or reading
The New York Times
for the twentieth time or skimming Ruth’s beauty magazines (although that one article on the correlation between frequent sex and good complexions was rather interesting).

Well, actually, there was one other thing they could do, but when he’d suggested it to Cynthia, she’d advised him to do that very thing to himself. Boy, did she have a foul mouth on her!

“What did you say?” Cynthia asked sleepily as she sat up and stretched.

“Huh?” He was too busy watching her stretch…an exercise in feline sensuality. His own personal sex kitten! She must have learned that pose from Ann-Margret. Or was that the way sharks got out the kinks? Frankly, he kind of liked her being kinky. “Oh, uhmm, I said, ‘Do you know what would look good on you?’”

“You?” she scoffed, taking note of his undue interest in her stretch.

Yep, the woman did have a tendency to zap him at every turn with her razor-sharp tongue. He’d like to ping the elastic in her latex a few dozen times to cure her of that habit. In fact, he’d like to ping her elastic
period…
all over.

“No, not me,” he said, making a deliberate effort to plaster a grin on his face. He knew his grin had an effect on her; so he was grinning a whole lot. He’d become a regular grinning prince. “Red stiletto high heels would look good on you…the ones we launched this year, called ‘Naughty or Nice.’ With your legs, they’d look sensational.” He put up a halting hand at the indignant expression that flashed onto her face. “No, no, no! Don’t go feminist on me, getting all bent out of shape just because I commented on your legs. That wasn’t meant as sexual harassment. It was a good old-fashioned compliment.”

“Well, thank you then,” she said meekly. Too meekly.

He glanced up sharply from the card table where he’d been working on the
Times’
s cross
word puzzle on and off all day long. He prided himself on getting a grand total of two words thus far.

“Oh, great! You’re crying,” he accused. He could take her foul mouth and her abrasive personality—they were part and parcel of her strange appeal to him—but weeping? No way!

“I am
not
crying. I never cry.” A fat tear escaped one eye and slid down her flushed cheek.

He got up from the table and shuffled over to the bed, climbing up beside her. Fluffing the pillows behind them, he wrapped an arm around her shoulder and tugged her against his side. It was a sign of her weakened state that she didn’t slug him. “Everyone cries sometimes,” he told her.

“Do you?”

He tried to think of the last time he’d cried. Suddenly, he pictured himself at his mother’s hospital bed…seventeen years ago. He blinked rapidly to fight back the sorrow generated by that alarming realization.
Seventeen years!
Had he frozen himself emotionally?

“Well, do you?” She leaned her head away slightly to get a better view of him.

“Not much,” he confessed. “But
you
have good reason to let loose. You’ve been through a lot this weekend.”

She nodded. “So have you.” Then she raised a fingertip and touched the edge of his eyelashes. “Did your mother have such long eyelashes, too?”

That shook his composure. Were they back to reading each other’s minds? A quick perusal of her features assured him that it was just an idle observation. “Yes. Yes, she did,” he admitted in a raspy voice. “In fact, her eyes were the first thing you noticed about her, now that I think about it. She never wore mascara or eyeliner like other ladies. It would have been overkill with those thick, thick lashes surrounding eyes of a startling shade of…”

“…midnight blue.”

He darted her a surprised glance.

“Like yours.”

His throat tightened then and he closed his eyes, fearing he might actually be tearing up.

She used the opportunity to caress the lashes of both his eyes. “Do you mind?”

He shook his head, eyes still closed, and allowed her to run the pads of her fingertips over the hairs, little feathery brushes, back and forth.

“They
are
silky, just like I thought,” she murmured.

“Is silky good?”

“Silky is
very
good.”

The tightness in his throat eased, and his lips turned up slightly. “What else do you like about me?”

She chuckled at his obvious bid for compliments.

He rolled onto his back, keeping his arm around her shoulder so that she was leaning over him. Then he folded his hands under his
head. He kept his eyes shuttered, wanting to prolong the rare peace between them.

“You have a strong nose.” She sketched its contour from bridge to upper lip.

“Strong doesn’t sound attractive. Cyrano had a strong nose—”

“So did Pinocchio.”

“Are you saying my nose is too big?”
Or that I’m a liar?

“Your nose is just right, Ferrama,” she assured him, giving the tip of his nose a playful tap. “Your ears, on the other hand, are a mite oversized.”

“They are?” He cracked his eyes open a slit to find her face hovering close to his,
very close
, as she examined the sensitive whorls of first one, then the other ear. His heart slammed against his chest walls in excitement, then began a steady, accelerated beat.

“Just kidding,” she said, biting her bottom lip in concentration as she continued her wonderfully torturous investigation.

He bit his bottom lip, too, but not because he was concentrating. He was afraid he might rear up and inspect her ears, tit for tat. With his teeth.

Exercising remarkable restraint—at least he thought it was remarkable—he closed his eyes again. Fortunately, she’d moved back to his face with her tactile exploration.

“Your Spanish heritage is evident in your high cheekbones and black hair,” she noted, tracing
the bones under his eyes with the fingers of both hands, then raking them quickly through his hair at the sides.

In order to have freedom of movement for both hands, she’d allowed her upper body to rest against his chest. Chivalrous knight that he was, he didn’t even look where they were joined. But he wanted to.

“Your whiskers are prickly, though. Do you have to shave twice a day?”

“Sometimes.” He didn’t elaborate, wanting her to guess when that sometimes might be. Wanting her to know he would shave again for her, if she wanted him to.

“Even the hair under your arms appears silky,” she said in a breathy voice, and stroked him there.

He almost shot up off the bed. Instead, he clenched his clasped hands into fists behind his head and gritted his teeth. But a low moan escaped anyway.

“Shhhh,” she soothed. Apparently she knew the effect she was having on him. And still she continued.

Am I about to get lucky? Man, oh, man, that ton of Lucky Clover cereal I inhaled this weekend must be working. Or was it Krispy Clover?

Or is my seductive charm more potent than I’d thought?

Hell, who cares? One doesn’t look a gift horse…uh, shark, in the mouth
. He relaxed as much as possible with testosterone pumping through
his bloodstream like a wildcat gusher.

Correction: The marvelous feeling flooding his body wasn’t exactly arousal…not of a raw sexual nature, anyhow. It was more like a squeezing, then release of something deep inside him, resulting in this odd swelling sensation. He couldn’t explain. All he knew was that it felt damn good.

“Do you know what your best body part is?” she asked, interrupting his disturbing thoughts.

He grinned. Opening his eyes fully now, he saw that she was propped on one elbow, gazing down at him.

“Not that,” she said, pinching his shoulder. “It’s your lips.”

She was so close he could feel her breath fanning his parted lips, could feel her heart beating against his, could see the dark rings surrounding the clear blue irises of her eyes.

“Would you like me to kiss you, Cynthia?” His voice was so low and raspy he barely recognized it.

She cocked her head, considering. Then she sighed. “I guess not.”

His body, which had stiffened with tense anticipation, slumped now with disappointment.

She rolled over on her back, and they reversed positions. She folded her arms behind her neck (causing the spandex to do incredible things across her chest…not that he was looking), and he leaned over her, braced on an elbow.

“Why?” he asked, trailing a fingertip over her
puffy, bruised-rose lips. Her lips were one of her best features, too.

“Why what?” she whispered.

“Why don’t you want me to kiss you?”

“Oh, I want you to kiss me, all right, but…”

That strange swelling in his heart grew and grew, like billowing clouds.

“…but it’s a road we can’t travel. It would be a dead-end street for me.” She let out a little breathy sigh of regret.

Her breath felt hot and wonderfully erotic against his fingertips. His fuzzy brain fought to understand her logic, but it was full of sensual clouds. “Why?” he choked out.

“Because you’re a prince, and I’m a…commoner. It isn’t done. You have to marry well for the sake of your people.”

He had to laugh at that. “Cynthia, this is America. There are no class separations here.” Briefly, he thought about telling her the truth, that he wasn’t really a prince, but he didn’t. For one thing, he was reluctant to shatter this incredible bond building between them. Plus, behind all the clouds fogging his thought processes, he still worried about his company and the danger this woman posed to its well-being.

“Yeah, but you’re a
Spanish
prince. Don’t deny that you’re expected to marry some royal princess.
Noblesse oblige
, or some such thing.”

“That’s French.”

“Same difference.”

“I’ll marry whomever I want,” he informed her
testily. When had this conversation steered its way to matrimony? Kissing was one thing, the big “I do” was another thing all together.

“Well, at the very least you’ll be in the market for a trophy wife,” she babbled on. “And foul-mouthed, materialistic, far-from-blue-blooded stock traders hardly qualify.”

“I kind of like your foul mouth.” He bobbed his eyebrows at her, trying to lighten the mood.

She ignored him. “I’ll bet your uncle, the king, already has some European princess lined up for you. Does Prince Rainier have any daughters left, or granddaughters?”

“Cynthia,” he reprimanded, “I’m not going to marry a freakin’ princess.”

“You have a pretty wicked mouth on you, too, Ferrama.”

“Yeah,” he agreed, with a grin that said there were some advantages to having a wicked mouth.

She tsk-tsked him, but the way she was staring at his mouth was very unsettling. Nice unsettling, not bad unsettling.
Oh, man, I better steer this conversation to safer ground
. He was still wary of her questions about marriage.

“Tell me why you never cry,” he urged, taking a strand of her hair between thumb and forefinger and rubbing the satiny threads with sensuous appreciation. He even raised it to his nose to inhale the faint flowery scent left by her shampoo.