Three

      Hopefully Mitch couldn’t see the flush burning her cheeks in the darkness, but for that instant, Nicole couldn’t have answered him if her life depended on it. Wild? Surely he had her confused with another woman. Warm, uninhibited, incredible? She had no idea who he was describing, but it couldn’t possibly be her.

      Her arms were already wrapped around her ribs, but she tucked them even tighter. For years she’d had her life on a clear track. She only colored between the lines. She obeyed the rules. She’d even decorated her house to express exactly the kind of woman she was—fussily neat, proper, on the formal side. She wasn’t remotely related to the selfish, irresponsible teenager she’d once been. Champagne or no champagne, she just couldn’t imagine throwing all that hard-won caution to the winds and being the kind of passionate cookie Mitch was describing.

      She wasn’t passionate.

      She wasn’t even an emotional woman. Actually, there were moments she thought she was turning into a downright tedious prig—but that was way better than flying through life barreling into impulsive, disastrous mistakes the way she used to.

      The tide whooshed in and foamed around her feet, seeping into her sneakers. The water was icy, yet she didn’t move, fiercely willing the cold to shock her mind into remembering that darn night. Only nothing came. The night was a complete blank slate—except for the parts he’d filled in.

      She stole a glance at Mitch, then quickly looked away. This was horrible. Suddenly she couldn’t look at him without thinking about sex. She’d never thought of him that way, not just because he was an employee, but because he was a blond beanpole. If a guy caught her eye, he invariably had darker coloring and some meat on his bones. Mitch was about five miles tall and all of it skinny.

      Only now she kept noticing that there was nothing skinny about the breadth of his shoulders. And his basket-ball-player height made her think of an athlete’s rhythm and stamina. And once she thought back, he’d just never looked at her with those sky-blue eyes in a nice, innocuous, friendly way. It was always there. That gender edginess. She just never forgot for an instant that she was female, not around Mitch, and now all those little details were adding up to drive her crazy. She’d have given gold for even fragments of memory from the night of the Christmas party, yet that corner of her mind seemed as locked as a bank vault.

      “Mitch,” she blurted out, “if it all happened that way, why didn’t you ever say anything to me long before this?”

      “Believe me, I wanted to. But everything after that started getting complicated. To begin with, I left in the morning while you were still sleeping. The last thing I wanted to do was leave you, but you’d told me there were cleaning people coming first thing in the morning to clear up after the party. And I just didn’t think you’d be comfortable, people coming in, a man in your house that way....”

      “I wouldn’t have been,” she admitted.

      “And I called you later that day. But right off, you brought up business, a problem with a client we’d been having...which was fine...except that it seemed real obvious to me you were deliberately avoiding any mention of our night together.”

      “I wasn’t deliberately avoiding anything, I swear! I honestly didn’t remember.”

      He nodded. “So you’re telling me now. But it never occurred to me that you didn’t remember then. I had no reason to know that, no reason to guess that. I assumed you knew, and that your ducking any mention of it was a choice. You closed up like a clam, and I was struggling to understand why. I knew perfectly well that you always had a hyper thing about not getting personally involved with the people who worked for you—”

      “Because it risks sexual harassment. Any boss is in a power position whether she wants to be or not. It just makes any personal relationship wrong—”

      “Nik, I know all the laws,” he said impatiently. “And I always respected you for being so careful—but none of that applied to you and me. I’d told you about my background. I don’t need the job. Not financially or in any other sense. You have no power over me like in a regular employer /employee situation. And since we’d talked about that, I figured that wasn’t the problem. It had to be something else. The only conclusion I could draw was that our making love had upset you, and you needed some time to think about it. So I shut up, too. As I saw it, that was what you wanted. And my feeling was just...to wait. Keep working together. See how you felt as time passed. I didn’t want to push or pressure you into something you didn’t want or weren’t ready for. But...”

      “But?” she echoed when he didn’t immediately finish his comment.

      He stopped, with the moonlit surf behind him, making his hair looked brushed with silver and the strong, angular bones in his face appear carved in stone. Only his eyes looked liquid, and his gaze focused on her face with the intensity of a caress. “But I also thought you knew, Nik. How incredible that night was. What kind of chemistry we’d created together. To be honest, I wasn’t thinking about the risk of babies. I was thinking that you’d been scared off by another kind of risk entirely—the way we’d come together like thunder and lightning. Because I never expected that kind of passionate explosion between us either.”

      Her throat went bone dry. So they were back to sex again. And not just sex, but incredible sex. How the evening had unfolded, why he’d stayed quiet later, thinking it was for her sake—she believed Mitch completely about those parts of the story. She trusted his integrity. He’d proven it a hundred times at work. Heaven knew, he could be tactful with a client, but he was the first one to leap in with sharp, blunt honesty when the going got rough. And truth to tell, she could easily imagine Mitch creating thunder and lightning as a lover. It was her. Being hot like that. Sexy like that. Nothing like he described had ever happened to her.

      Possibly she’d chosen to be celibate for a blue moon, but she was no virgin. Her first forays into sexuality, though, all stemmed from the era when she’d been rebellious, reckless and painfully young. She hadn’t known what she was doing, any more than the boys she’d experimented with. Whatever sensuality was in her nature...it wasn’t a matter of hiding it. She always wanted to explore that with the right man. But she’d had mistakes to bury and atone for and fix, and it had taken every ounce of her time to make a new life for herself. She’d put her hormones up in a mental attic.

      Or she thought she had.

      “Am I making you uncomfortable, talking about this?” he asked her.

      “It doesn’t matter whether I’m uncomfortable or not. I needed to know the truth.” But now she could barely look at him without feeling heat climb her throat in a heart-slamming rush.

      “Yeah, I agree. Knowing what happened is a critical ingredient to your deciding what you want to do next. And that’s what we got together to talk about, isn’t it?”

      “Sex?” Tarnation. Doubtless the word slipped out because it was in block letters at the tip of her mind.

      But Mitch