Lightning That Lingers by Sharon Curtis, Tom Curtis Page B

librarian?”
    Shaking herself out of her amazement that he just happened to have a pocketful of Jinx’s favorite treat, she began to close her blouse with fingers that trembled. “When I was eight years old, I was carrying a stack of books to the checkout desk in my public library and a boy pushed me from behind as a joke. When I dropped my bookson the floor, one of the librarians shushed me angrily. It was very traumatic because I was a quiet child and no one had ever scolded me in public. I decided that when I grew up I’d have a library too, but my library would never be like hers.”
    His eyes strayed briefly, thoughtfully, to hers before he emptied the few papers from the wicker waste basket and lowered Jinx inside with a scattering of sunflower seeds. Downy-light as the touch of his eyes had been, she felt entered, analyzed, absorbed.… Without the gerbil in his hand, he looked much more dangerous. Trying to cloak her inner desperation, she sped on, “Everyone said they’d graduate me with a bun on the back of my head and a pencil stuck in it but as you can see, I’ve cut my hair and …”
    His fingers in her hair, penetrating to her scalp, running along the edge of her ear brought her words to a warbling halt.
    “I like your hair short,” he murmured, dropping a soft kiss on the curve of her throat. “It’s cute. And you have a lovely neck.”
    An easy motion of his hand brought a chair in front of hers and he sat down facing her, his body very close, one of his knees separating hers. Her breath caught at the sudden pleasure-filled uplift in her abdomen from the pressure of his leg inside her thigh. Her gaze dropped involuntarily to his legs. There was a mesmeric fascination in the way his lean muscles tugged at the age-polished denim, and she found herself following the taut line upward with her eyes until it occurred to her what she was doing. Her cheeks were flooding with color as she tried to pretend that she hadonly been trying to study the logo on his faded sweatshirt. She recognized the famous alien there with a jolt.
    “E.T.?” she asked suddenly.
    “Yes. Shall I show you how to turn on my heart light?”
    Her gaze flew to his and held there suspended in the perception and tenderness and dancing light she saw in his eyes.
    Giving her a little grin, he began to walk two fingers up her thigh, murmuring, “Eensy weensy spider …”
    Seeing that she was continuing to stare at him in the transfixed way he was not unaccustomed to receiving from women, he tried again. “There’s no telling what Jinx might have been up to under your shirt. You’d better let me check your underwear.”
    Her deepening flush and steady wide-eyed gaze, the engaging rise and fall of her breasts against the light fabric of her blouse, the dusky barely parted lips, were drawing deep-rooted answers from his senses; and his desire to have his arms filled with her became almost as great as his desire to make her smile. Holding her waist in a light clasp, he drew her toward him, setting her on his leg with her thighs straddling one of his. What the pressure of her delicately hugging thighs aroused in him showed in his voice as he murmured, “You make a ravishing monkey.” One of his palms slipped upward to massage her neck, bringing her lips slowly toward his. “Want to monkey around?”
    But her warm unsteady fingers covered his mouth gently, a stubborn mute barrier. Her otherhand pressed shakily against his chest, begging for space.
    “Philip, no.”
    Under his hands he could feel the tense hold of her body, the winsome trembling in her thighs. He could sense her lacerating inner struggle against the violent flame that was the mirror of his own. He searched her expressive brown eyes.
    “No?” he asked.
    “No.” She whispered the word and tried to slide away, her warm inner thighs brushing over his jeans. His hands stopped her.
    “Why?”
    “Because—Philip, please. Let me go. I can’t think with my—with your