He took her hips in his hands, digging his fingers into her flesh, and drove himself up into her, hard and fast, mercilessly, answering her moans with his own.

“Catherine…” he gasped, teetering on the edge, wanting to wait for her, but losing his hold on sanity, sailing over. “Cat!”

She followed immediately, his cries sharpening her climax.  She arched her back and clenched her eyes—and lips—shut, her entire body stiffening with the impact of her orgasm, forcing her to hold her breath and clutch his shoulders in an iron grip.

“Marc…” she whispered, wishing she could say the words.

She collapsed on top of him, straightening her legs along his, and resting her cheek on his chest.  When she finally regained the strength to move, she breathlessly lowered herself to the side to lie next to him.  She draped an arm across his torso and tucked her head under his chin.  He ran his fingers up and down her arm, sending tingles along her skin.  He dropped a kiss on the top of her head.

“Now, what was all that about me trying to seduce you?” he asked humorously, inhaling the herbal fragrance of her hair. “You’re the one who said screw the baseball game, then pulled me back into bed.  Don’t you know how much box seats go for, woman?”

She smiled and tugged gently at a dark hair on his lightly furred chest.

“I can’t help it,” she sighed, admitting that much of the truth.  “I haven’t made lo—uh, had sex for a long time, before you.  And you’re definitely very good at what you do, Marc.  If you’re not careful, I could want —um, get used to this.” 

She’d almost blundered, twice.

“Mm, well…” he mumbled noncommittally.  “You’re not so bad yourself.  For a second there, I thought I might not make it back to reality.  In fact, I think it might be a good idea for me to widen my horizons, turn up a few more sex-starved borderline-nymphomaniacs.”

She tried to ignore the twinge of pain his words caused her.  She forced a bit of humor to her response, humor that she didn’t really feel.

“Just don’t invite them over until I leave, okay?  I don’t like to share.”

He tugged on a lock of her hair.

“Where’s your sense of adventure, babe?” he laughed, only half joking.  “It could be fun.  You, me, a few of your friends…”

Sensing the direction the conversation was about to take, she eased away and sat up.

“A few of my friends,” she repeated, looking down at him.  “You know, you’re right.  It could be fun.  I’ll just see if Jim or Peter or Duncan would like to join us sometime.”

Marcus watched without reply as she got up and walked into the bathroom, picking up on the sudden coolness of her tone and sensing the change in her mood.  He felt an uncharacteristic pang of regret, knowing that he’d deliberately rubbed her the wrong way.  He didn’t like feeling that pang, either.  He wasn’t accustomed to caring one way or another about his current lover’s moods.  Usually, the mutual understanding was that sex was the order of the day.  Usually, it was clear between them both that theirs was to be a relationship of the ‘no strings’ variety.  Lately, however, with Catherine, he’d found himself thinking about more than sex, and that scared the hell out of him.  So, his knee-jerk response was to say or do something to keep her distant, to keep himself distant.

But scared or no, it still didn’t feel good.

“That’d be great,” he called after her, knowing he was being an ass.  “As long as they bring dates.  It’ll be one hell of a party!”

 

Catherine’s fingers were like talons as she gripped the steering wheel, her knuckles bloodless. As she drove home in the pre-dawn darkness, she wished she could blow off going in to work.

What she needed was a good, long, hot shower.

What she needed was an hour-long full body massage by a gorgeous hunk with massive hands and gifted lips and unending stamina…

Just like Marcus.

She almost slapped herself.

Damn it, what she really needed was to break it off with him before she fell any deeper.  On her present course, she was heading for disaster, and she knew it.  He wanted nothing to do with a serious, committed relationship.  He’d been more than clear on that when they’d first started seeing each other.  And her attraction to him had been her downfall.  She’d lied and told him she felt the same way—and ended up in bed with him on their first date.

She remembered the first time she’d seen him, at his north side restaurant, clad in his white chef’s apron, coming out of the kitchen to accept her congratulations on his grand opening.  He’d been nervously surprised to be told that she was a restaurant critic from a major Chicago paper, then elated to be told that her review would be glowing.  He’d smiled that bewitching smile of his, sable-colored eyes crinkling ever so slightly at the outer corners, perfect teeth flashing brilliantly as he brushed the ever-errant lock of long dark hair off his forehead, telling her that her meals would be on the house every time she visited.

There had been heat in his eyes, and an invitation in the wink he’d sent her.

She’d fallen on the spot.

She knew better.

She’d sworn off gorgeous men long ago; they were nothing but trouble.  They’d always seemed to require not just her adoring attention, but that of every other female within a radius of a quarter mile.  She’d even almost married one of them—saved from a horrible fate when she’d caught him in the shower making love to someone else, shocked even further to find that the ‘someone else’ was a man.

There had been only two men in her bed before Marc.  The main reason for her self-imposed celibacy was the incontrovertible fact that giving her body invariably led to giving her heart.  And she’d not had much luck with that in her twenty-seven years.  The smart thing would be to go her merry way where Marc was concerned.  The last thing she could afford to do was fall in love with him, to let her heart become dependent upon him, knowing her feelings would never be returned.

Yet that was exactly what she had done.

Damn it all!

 

Marc entered his condo the next night, holding the door open for his ‘date’. Again, he tamped down the twinge of guilt, the sense of betrayal over what he was about to do.

He had no choice.  There was no other way.

He had to break it off with Cat before she started to become important to him, before she became the first thing in his mind every morning, the last, every night…

He could do it.  He’d done it before.  He’d broken off dozens of liaisons.

Except that before, he’d been able to just come out and say it.  He hadn’t had these bothersome feelings getting in the way.  He’d not felt this unexplained apprehension over what it might do to her, hadn’t suffered this unprecedented sense of cowardice because he couldn’t tell her flat out.

Of course, his unease could stem from the fact that, unlike before, he wasn’t ending the relationship because he was bored with her.  Far from it.  He needed to end it because she was coming too close—and he was starting to want her to.

She was due to arrive in fifteen minutes.  That was just about enough time to set the stage.

He wondered if he’d be able to look in the mirror after she’d gone.

 

There was no answer to her knock.

Puzzled, Catherine knocked on the door again, wondering if she’d arrived at his place ahead of him. There must have been some delay in closing up the restaurant, she thought.  She fished around in her purse and pulled out the extra key he’d given her.  Sliding it into the lock, she let herself in and closed the door quietly behind her.

She crossed the living room, dropping her purse on the leather sofa.  Heading for the kitchen for some iced tea, she was stopped by a sound from the hallway that led to the bedroom.  For a second, she was frozen with the fear that she’d walked in on a burglary, but then the unmistakable tinkle of a woman’s laugh reached her.

Instantly, her insides knotted.

No.  Not again.

Not Marc.  He wouldn’t.

Then again, he might.  He felt no exclusivity in their relationship, even if she did.  To him, she was just a good tumble—and, apparently, so was the woman currently in his bed.

The woman laughed again, and said something about the condom being too small. Catherine heard him return some teasing remark, though she couldn’t make out his words.

Against her will, she felt the sting of tears in her eyes, and cursed herself again for her weakness.  She had known all along that he didn’t, wouldn’t, love her.  He had not made any false promises or declarations to get her into bed.  The only thing that he was guilty of was mixing up the dates on his social calendar, though she’d believed that she was the only woman he’d been seeing—and taking to his bed.

But it hurt.  God, how it hurt.

There was no point in confronting him, of playing the wounded heart and bursting in upon them, subjecting herself to the sight of him naked with another woman.

Her fingers numb, she dropped the key on the glass coffee table, not reacting to the clattering noise it made as it landed.  She left stiffly, not caring that the door slammed loudly behind her.

Marcus heard the sound of the key hitting the tabletop, then the door as it banged shut.

He ordered his fully-clothed companion from under the sheets and sent her, pouting, but fifty dollars richer, on her way.

He didn’t sleep much that night.

 

By morning, Catherine had worked her way past sorrow, through indignation, straight to outrage.

How dare he!

Even if they weren’t exclusive, how dare he be so thoughtless as to entertain another lover on a night he’d asked to see her!  As a matter of fact, how dare he be so shallow, carrying on more than one affair at a time!  Who did he think he was anyway, some pimply teenager with hormones raging through him like a Mac truck?  Some middle-aged lothario in his first full blown stage of mid-life crisis?

How dare he hurt her like this!    

Well, she’d heard the expressions, ‘Revenge is a dish best served cold,’ and, ‘Don’t get mad, get even,’ a hundred times.  She would do just that, striking at him through the only thing in the world he truly cared about.

After all, the pen was mightier than the sword, right?

Yes, she’d get even.

She hadn’t seen Marc for almost a year, not since he’d hauled her into court to sue her for her scathing review, claiming she’d defamed him and cost him restaurant patronage.  The legal battle had been short but vicious, expensive and ugly.  The only winners had been the lawyers as the judge had thrown the case out, declaring it a waste of the court’s time and a strictly personal matter between two feuding ex-lovers.  In the course of the litigation, Catherine and Marcus had become bitter enemies, any trace of the attraction they had once shared totally dissipated.  She couldn’t stand the sight of him, or he, of her.

Now, they sat combatively in the matching wing chairs, dumbstruck by the bombshell the attorney had just dropped into their respective laps.

“That’s just not possible, Mr. Greenberg,” Catherine said, shaking her head.  “I don’t even know anyone named Faith Goodman.”

“Nor do I,” Marc snapped, his patience wearing thin.  “Why would a complete stranger name us in her will?”

Greenberg sighed heavily, and took off his bifocals.

“I was not given specific reasons,” he said, rubbing the lenses with a tissue.  “She was an old woman living alone.  She had no living relatives to inherit her estate upon her death.  She didn’t want everything to go to the state, so she named the two of you as her sole beneficiaries.”

Catherine folded her arms and crossed her legs, unwittingly drawing Marcus’ attention to the length of leg exposed by the short skirt of her suit.  He quickly looked away.

“But how did she even know us?” she asked, perplexed.

The attorney shuffled some papers on his desk.

“Mrs. Goodman was a little…eccentric,” he replied tactfully, replacing the glasses on his nose.

“You mean she was crazy?” Marc interrupted, ignoring the frown Catherine sent him.

Greenberg sniffed.

“Certainly not,” he said indignantly, looking with censure at Marc.  “I was her attorney, and her friend, for years, and I can tell you that she was not impaired.  She just had her own way of looking at the world.  Anyway, as I was about to say, she liked to visit police stations and courtrooms —she enjoyed watching the proceedings.  She said that she’d seen the two of you battling in court, debating a case of, as she put it, ‘he said, she said’.”

Marc and Catherine glanced briefly at each other with contempt, then looked back as Greenberg continued.

“She said that she’d observed a lot of people in what she called ‘her search’, and that you two were ‘the ones’.  The closest thing to an explanation she would give me was that the two of you were in desperate need of what you would receive through her. And that is a direct quote.  I have no idea what she meant, since it is obvious that neither of you is exactly destitute.”

Marc leaned back in his chair, straightening his legs and crossing his ankles.

“Okay, okay,” he said, exhaling sharply.  “So what are we talking about here?  Her collection of salt and pepper shakers or world’s fair teaspoons, her twenty-eight cats and a couple dozen balls of yarn?”

Catherine sighed, as irritated with his attitude as the attorney. Mr. Greenberg took a deep breath.

“Mrs. Goodman’s net worth comes to 19.6 million dollars,” he informed them flatly.

Catherine almost choked, and Marcus nearly slid from his chair.

“Bank accounts, property, stocks, life insurance, etc.,” Greenberg expounded, unfazed, “less taxes and legal fees, of course.  You two share the bulk of her estate.  There is, however, one stipulation to meet for you to inherit.

“To receive your bequests, you must reside in her ancestral home, Rose House, for a period of six weeks, effective immediately —or as soon as you can arrange your affairs to accommodate your absence.  While there, you will be required to care for the place as needed and, specifically, to restore and remodel the turret room at the top of the house.  You are not to hire help or accept any offers of assistance.  Everything about the house must be done by you and you alone.  A generous sum of money has been placed in an account for your use to accomplish this task and for your personal needs, and the house is well stocked with foodstuffs and supplies, so you need not worry about having to use any of your own funds during this six week period.  I will make bi-weekly visits to monitor your progress.  Failure by one or both of you to remain in the house for the entire six weeks will result in the forfeiture of all bequests.  Do you have any questions?”