Trust Me on This - Jennifer Crusie [40]
Chapter 6
Harry had given up not thinking about Victoria. He’d been wrestling with his thoughts all night, trying to shove everything about her away, and it wasn’t working. Even though he knew it was a dumb thing to do, he was going to have to go see her. Never a man to agonize over a foregone conclusion, Harry headed for the nineteenth floor.
Harry got to Victoria’s door at the same time as room service. Room service was carrying a bottle of Champagne and two glasses.
“I’ll take those,” Harry said, and signed the check, tipping the waiter lavishly. Then he knocked on Victoria’s door, trying to keep his heart from pounding through his chest.
When she opened the door, she was in her lace robe.
“I just took these away from room service,” he said. “Who’s the Champagne for? I’m warning you, if you’ve got Donald Compton in there, there’s going to be blood on the carpet.”
Victoria leaned on the door, looking better than any woman had a right to. “I ordered the Champagne,” she told him, and there was a quiver in her voice. “I had plans to call you up here for a conference and seduce you, but now that you’re yelling at me again—” Harry swallowed, stuck on the word “seduce,” so Victoria kept going, her nervousness as plain as her exasperation. “Listen, you big galoot, I’m getting tired of opening and closing this door around you. If you come in here again, you’re staying the night.”
“Oh, yeah,” Harry said, finding his voice at last. “And how are you going to stop me if I try to leave?”
Victoria untied her belt with one swift pull and shrugged the lace robe to the floor.
“That should do it,” Harry said, and moved toward her, kicking the door shut behind him.
Alec spent the night staring at his ceiling, trying to dislike Dennie for being a crook and ending up trying to figure out ways to save her, instead. It was definitely time he got out of fieldwork permanently. He’d never thought about letting a bad guy get away before, but now all he could think about was getting her out of the picture before they arrested Bond. Well, not all he could think about. There were those eyes and those lips and that body and that laugh and the heat he’d seen in her eyes when he’d wrapped himself around her. Think about the job, he told himself, and then he thought about Dennie some more.
The thing about Dennie was that she was the kind of woman he could spend the rest of his life with and not get bored. He’d never tripped across that kind of woman before, and he had an idea they were few and far between so he’d better hold on to this one. If Harry was right, and she was a crook, he had less than forty-eight hours to convince her to change careers. Then he’d have to convince her to move to a strange city so they could get to know each other better. And along the way his hormones would appreciate it if he could talk her into bed too.
“No problem,” he said out loud, and then rolled over and tried to go to sleep again.
Dennie spent the night staring at the ceiling, trying to figure out how she was going to survive if Taylor fired her, trying not to think about Alec but thinking of him obsessively anyway. This is purely physical, she told herself, and she knew she lied and wondered when Alec had become more than great kisses and juvenile banter over dinner. Forget him, think of the stories, she told herself, think of Walter and his dog biscuits, but she thought of him again anyway, and finally fell asleep in the thin light of dawn, thinking of his smile, and his hands, and his lovely long body, and how much she was going to miss him when he was gone.
* * *
Harry watched the dawn come up through Victoria’s window as she nestled warm against him. When she started to stir, he kissed the top of her head where it rested against his chest.
“I’ve got to go, love,” he whispered. “I don’t want Bond to see me leaving your room.” He thought for a moment. “Or Alec for that matter. He’d probably beat me up for seducing you.”
Victoria laughed sleepily. “Who