a bullet in the leg and the death of a good friend to slow me down. I made some decisions while I was lying in the hospital. I decided there was some value to restraint, self-discipline, moral responsibility. It seems to me you’re coming at it from the other end. Basically we’re people with passionate personalities, but you were taught control as a child. You got lots of strokes for playing by the rules, so you rolled along as the good girl, always eager to please your parents, your teachers, your bosses.”
She stopped at the top of the stairs. “Are you trying to tell me I’m not a good girl?”
He eased her coat off her shoulders and hung it on the coatrack. “Like Mae West once said, ‘when you’re good, you’re very good, but when you’re bad, you’re better.’”
“I think Mae West was referring to her sexual talents.”
Pete grinned, moving in on her like a jungle cat going after something unsuspecting and tasty. “That too.”
She took a step backward, but his hands had already freed her blouse from her skirt. “Hey!”
“We don’t need you to be wired anymore. No sense wasting the battery.”
He’d worn his share of listening devices and knew the best way to remove them was in one fell swope. He grabbed an end of the surgical tape and yanked.
“Yeow!”
“Sorry about that.” His fingers skimmed over the stinging flesh, soothing and arousing. “Feel better?”
She could only blink at him.
He unhooked her bra and caught the transmitter as it fell out. With his other hand he cupped a breast, thinking clandestine operations were a lot more fun with Louisa as a partner.
She was paralyzed. A wild animal caught in the beam of a searchlight, held captive by his fingers.
Louisa could barely breathe for the sensations pulsing through her body. He knew all her secret pleasures. He knew how and where to touch and kiss. And he knew the words she liked to hear…words of endearment, words of passion.
He rummaged through the freezer and pulled out a bag of homemade raviolis he’d gotten from the Italian deli on Connecticut. He set a pot of water to boil and scrounged a box of crushed, sun-dried tomatoes from the over-the-counter cupboard.
“You’re really very domestic,” Louisa said. She was at the table, wearing his big terry robe, feeling very lazy. She was resigned to the fact that she had no willpower when it came to the sexual attraction between them and had reached the conclusion that it wouldn’t hurt to enjoy it.
He looked around the apartment and laughed out loud. She was right. He’d become domestic. If someone had said that to him ten years earlier, he’d have broken his nose.
“I used to live like Kurt.”
“What happened?”
“You know how some people find religion late in life? I found middle class.” He threw a frozen ravioli in Spike’s direction, and the cat attacked it.
Louisa didn’t want to burst his bubble, but he wasn’t exactly middle-class. She was on intimate terms with middle-class and knew for a fact that owning a luxury sports car and a three-thousand-dollar tux was not typical middle-class.
She supposed he meant he’d found middle-class values, but she wasn’t so sure of that, either. The men in her parents’ neighborhood didn’t feed their cat stick for dinner, and didn’t hang out with wiretappers. She amended that last part to illegal wiretappers. After all, it was Washington.
He dropped a handful of ice cubes into a goblet, poured cola over it, and gave the drink to Louisa. He was still feeling the aftershocks of their lovemaking—violent ripples of affection that grabbed him in the gut and sent panicky messages of love and commitment to his brain. He wasn’t ready to deal with messages of commitment, so he got himself a cold beer and took a long pull on the bottle.
“Tell me more about being different.”
She tried for casual reserve but had no luck. The excitement bubbled out at the first opportunity to discuss her new plans. “I want to return to school. I want to be a lawyer.”
It caught him by surprise. He hadn’t expected a career change, but now that he thought about it, it made sense. He’d gone through a similar metamorphosis. He ran it through his mind one more time and nodded. “You’d make a terrific lawyer.”
“You really think so?”
“Yup. I think you should go for it.”
She’d badly wanted someone to say it, to encourage her. She flashed him a brilliant smile and felt her eyes mist over for a split