LOVING HER SOUL MATE by Katherine Cachitorie

young Shay
based on instinct alone.   He didn’t even
consider their previous relationship because this was business.   She seemed to him to be a person who wasn’t
an ass-kisser and wouldn’t fall for the okey-doke McNamara and his boys were
sure to throw her way.   And now, as he
looked around her home and realized she wasn’t trying to kiss up to him,
either, he believed his instinct was dead on.
    Just as it was the first time he
entered her home, it was a clean house, but it was an untidy one.   Books and newspapers littered the place, from
the sofa to the coffee table to the dining table at the back of the room.   Shay, in fact, answered the door with reading
glasses on her face and a book in her hand.   And she didn’t try to remove the glasses when she saw him, either.   Didn’t try to smooth down
her long hair that she wore in a gorgeously rumpled ponytail, or put on any
makeup.   Vanity didn’t seem to be
on this chick’s radar screen.   And the
clothes she wore, a well-worn UAB Blazers t-shirt and a pair of loose-fitting
athletic shorts, was even more evidence to John that unlike those other females
who went to great lengths to please him, she wasn’t jumping through any hoops
whatsoever on his behalf.  
    It was downright refreshing to
him.
    As he entered her small home,
filling it with his larger-than-life presence as soon as he walked in, Shay
could feel the mood of the room shift and take on an almost sexual charge.   He had changed out of the suit he wore at the
press conference that morning, and into a pair of jeans and a tucked-in white
polo shirt.   He was all biceps and thighs
as he walked in.   And the mere scent of
him, that fresh, cologne scent that met her nostrils, was enough to make his
masculinity become as much a presence in her home as he was.   This was supposed to be a normal meeting with
a source, but it was already feeling like something completely different.  
    And as she closed the door and
escorted him to the sofa further into her living room, moving ahead to clear
the books and papers that covered the seat, she knew she had to get it
together.   Because if she didn’t, she
would be behaving as if she was the lousy reporter some at the Tribune and even
Chief McNamara predicted she was going to be.   She knew she had to forget the fact that the guy was gorgeous.   Forget the fact that virility and sensuality
cloaked him like a strait jacket, and just do her job.
    John knew he had a job to do, too,
but that didn’t stop him from checking out her long dark neck, her straight
back, her smooth, curvy legs as she led him to her
sofa.   And when she bent over to remove
stacks of books and papers that clogged the seat, and he got an unobstructed
view of that same firm bottom he could still visualize, his penis began to
throb.  
    She turned him on.   He, in fact, was turned on the first time he
saw her.   At first it was all physical
for John.   It was her nice, curvy figure,
her style, the innocence in her pretty eyes.   And although he knew he could find a woman with a better looking body
and a nicer looking face any day of the week around Brady, there was something
about her face, and her body that made him almost anxious to
get her naked and in his bed.  
    But most striking to John was his
emotional reaction to her that day three months ago, and the way she stared at
him with such intensity that day.   She
stared as if she could see right through his bullshit.   That look of hers was so fine-tuned, so
precision dead-on that she made him feel exposed.   He was a burned-out, shell of a man, not the
tough-as-nails hero the newspapers always made him out to be, and she knew it,
that look said to him.   It spoke so
loudly, in fact, that after their second encounter in his office, he avoided
her gaze ever since.   He would ask about
her, whenever he ran into Ronnie Burk, and Ronnie even chided John once about
how he never inquired about any of the male reporters