by the driving rhythm. A smile curved his mouth. God, if he didn't feel twenty again, his mind alert, his body primed.
A throaty, feminine voice sang along with Jim Morrison.
D. B. slowly straightened in his chair and opened his eyes.
As he'd imagined earlier, Samantha stood in front of him. Her blouse was off, her bra was gone. Her hair was up in its twist and her skirt was still on, but not for long.
He reached out and drew her to him, his fingers digging into the sexy curve of her hips. Her breasts brushed his mouth.
"I've been waiting all night for this," he said.
Her neck arched as he licked a tight nipple. She moaned softly.
He sucked, the taste of her, the feel of her, delicious against his tongue. The night was burning, all right. "It's been four months," he said. "And it gets better every time."
Samantha Wilder had put the "life" back into "midlife."
CHAPTER FIVE
Kitty stared, unseeing, into the darkness out the bedroom window of her tiny rented house. If tonight's bad news was her being forced once more to observe the reaction her mother had been inspiring since she returned to town six months before, its good news was Dylan's shock had allowed Kitty to break free of him for the evening.
She needed the respite.
Of course, "good news" was relative, because he'd still been grounded enough to extract her promise to breakfast with him the next morning. And to add more weight to the bad-news side, breaking free of Dylan had freed her to tackle some long-overdue accounting, not a happy task.
The cursor on her laptop computer blinked insistently, nagging her to get on with updating the financial files. Somewhere, somehow, keeping the books had become another responsibility of the "head" of the one-person advertising and PR department of the Hot Water Preservation Society. Though Kitty had earned a minor in accounting as an accent to her advertising degree, working the numbers was her least favorite duty.
And right now, her most depressing one.
Sighing, she reran the balance sheet. Dismal. Though she'd been aware that admissions were off in Old Town, she hadn't been considering how much energy the air-conditioning units in the restored buildings were using to keep up with the uncommon heat. The higher utility bills were a further blow to the bottom line.
While the area that preserved Hot Water's roots was actually owned by a descendant of one of the town's founding fathers - Bram Bennett, to be precise - the reenactors were paid a percentage of the profits. This summer's low ticket sales might not mean the difference between filet mignon and the soup line for the reenactors, but it made a big mental difference to Kitty. Leaving Hot Water with a clear conscience meant using her share of this summer's proceeds to wipe out her college loan from Aunt Cat. Her aunt wouldn't hold her to it, of course, but running away from the woman who had loved and raised Kitty was bad enough without running away and leaving something behind.
Her mother had done that - left Kitty - and the last thing Kitty wanted was to resemble her mother in any way.
She was going to fulfill her obligations.
Then she was going to leave Hot Water and never return.
Samantha's homecoming had forced that. The return of that Wilder woman had served up another plateful of gossip and innuendo about their family. Before that, Kitty hadn't gone so far as to consider herself respectable per se, but she had reached the point where she didn't feel completely tarred by the tart brush. Then, reenter Samantha and exit any designs on conventionality Kitty had ever dreamed of.
Thinking of the stunned expression on Dylan's face this evening just confirmed it. She was paying off Aunt Cat and then she was outta here.
Elbows on the desk, Kitty dropped her head toward her fisted hands and rapped gently against her skull. "Think, think, think," she whispered to herself. She'd graduated with honors, for goodness' sake. Surely her ad-trained brain could dream up some spicy draw to attract the tourists to Hot Water despite the record heat and the price of crude oil.
But with her eyes closed she could think only of Dylan. His dark, intense eyes, his rock-and-roller hair, his masculine charisma that had strange women lining up at her aunt's gate.
Dylan, who was a national hero.
Kitty's pulse fluttered as a delicious but dangerous idea floated to the surface of her mind. Well, "floated" was a misstatement. This idea was