Envy Mass Market

She held his gaze for a moment, her expression turning sulky. “You really don’t mind my blowing in Morris Blume’s ear?”

“Figure of speech.”

“So what you said earlier…”

“About?”

“About your wanting this deal for us. Did you mean it?”

By way of answer, he pulled her against him and kissed her.

She finished unbuttoning his shirt, then spread it open and put tongue to nipple, flicking it lightly. “You did?”

“Right now I’d swear to anything.”

Laughing huskily, she stroked him through his trousers. “I don’t like sharing you with Maris. I’m impatient to have this all to myself.”

“I’m rather impatient myself.” He unzipped his trousers and pushed down his shorts. Nadia dropped to her knees and nuzzled him. She traced the length of his erection with her tongue before taking him into her mouth. Noah grunted with satisfaction.

“You stick to doing what you do best, Nadia, and leave the problem of the Matherlys to me.”

Chapter 9

Parker was at his computer. He’d been up for hours. His mind was skipping like a stone over water.

Mike delivered a third cup of coffee to him. “Your guest just left the cottage. She’s dawdling along the way, taking in the seascape, but she’ll soon be making an entrance.”

He had asked Mike to be on the lookout for her and acknowledged the report with a nod.

Mike was uncharacteristically careless as he replaced Parker’s empty coffee mug with the full one. Hot coffee sloshed out. The spill spread across the table and stained several sheets of handwritten notes. Parker stared at the mess, then raised his head and gave the older man a look.

“Sorry,” Mike said.

“I’ll bet.”

Mike snorted.

“Look, if you’ve got something to say, why not act like a grown-up and just say it?”

“I think you know what I have to say, Parker.”

“How about ‘congratulations’?”

“How about ‘get real’? Do you really expect me to congratulate you?”

“She’s here, isn’t she?”

“Yes. She’s here.” Mike looked none too happy about it, though.

Parker raised his shoulders in a shrug, asking impatiently, “What? The reverse psychology worked. She took the bait. Which is what we hoped she would do. If you had qualms, you should have thrown away her phone numbers when that deputy gave them to you. But you didn’t. You passed them on to me. I called her and she came. So what’s eating you?”

Mike turned away and stamped back into the kitchen. “My biscuits are burning.”

Parker returned to his computer screen, but the interruption had log-jammed his creative flow. He couldn’t focus on the last few sentences he’d written. They now seemed a jumble of words and phrases beyond translation. In an effort to assign them meaning, he forced his eyes to stop on each word separately. But no matter how hard he concentrated, he couldn’t make sense of them. They could have been written in Sanskrit.

And then he realized why reading and understanding his own words had suddenly become a challenge: He was nervous. Which was odd, considering that everything had fallen into place more or less as he had planned. He’d made a few spontaneous adjustments to accommodate Maris Matherly-Reed’s personality, but she was responding to him and his situation even better than he had dared hope she would.

Now that he thought about it, getting her here had been almost too easy. He had pulled the strings, and, like a puppet, she had made the correct moves. He figured that’s what had Mike’s shorts in a wad this morning. Her innocent cooperation had lent her a certain vulnerability and made her seem almost a victim.