Midnight Man (Midnight #1)(7)

Wordless, she stared at him.

“You need a new security system,” he said.

She opened her mouth but nothing came out. New security system. The words circled around her head but couldn’t find a place to land. She couldn’t get a handle on them, on her emotions.

His expression was completely unchanged. Set, unsmiling, serious. She couldn’t begin to read his reaction.

If he even had one. He seemed completely unaffected. And yet she knew he had been affected in at least one big way.

Embarrassment was coming in right after the shock, in great rolling waves. She could feel the heat of it rise in her face, together with another heat, completely uncontrollable.

Suzanne searched in her depths for some way to deal with the situation. Some nice neutral ladylike etiquette that would help her handle having felt the penis of a complete stranger.

Erect penis, if you please.

Huge, erect penis.

Oh God.

Her gaze shot to about six inches above his head. Her throat was dry and her lungs hurt.

“You need a new security system,” he repeated. New security system. New. Security. System. She needed a new security system.

Well…yes. If he was able to break through her system in the time it took her to place a phone call, she probably did need a new one.

“Okay,” she croaked. She cleared her throat. “Okay. I’ll look into it as soon as I can. I’ll ask around—“

“Don’t bother. I’ll install one for you. One not even I can get through. As a thank you for your designs.”

“You don’t need to—“ Suzanne looked at his face. Not a face you said no to. “Okay. Thanks.”

“What’s your favorite restaurant here in Portland?”

She huffed out a little breath, shifting gears. “Well, I suppose… Comme Chez Soi. But why do you—“

“We can talk about your new system tonight, over dinner.” He stated it as a fact, like gravity.

“Dinner?”

He nodded. “I’ll pick you up at seven.”

Suzanne fumbled to get her bearings, but balance eluded her. She couldn’t even begin to think, not with this man in the same room, sucking out all the oxygen and taking with it all her common sense.

She said the only thing she could say. “Okay.”

“Bring a key for me because I won’t be able to install the new security system until the day after tomorrow at the earliest. I’ll be sleeping here tomorrow night. I’ll bring my bed first thing.”

Bed. His bed. Suzanne could imagine him only too well in his bed, big body sleeping in tangled sheets.

“Okay,” she whispered.

He stared at her for another few seconds, dark eyes boring into hers as if he could walk inside her mind. Then he nodded and walked toward the door. He didn’t seem to rush but he covered ground fast. In a second, he was out the door.

Large as he was, he didn’t make any noise. How could that be? He was wearing boots and they had to make some sound on hardwood flooring, didn’t they?

But he disappeared as silently as he had come. He’d appeared before her as suddenly as a ghost. And then he was gone.

Suzanne stared at where he’d been long after she heard the front door snick shut, then groped blindly for a chair. She had a busy day ahead of her but she couldn’t go anywhere until her legs stopped trembling.





CHAPTER THREE


At 1900 on the dot, John rang Suzanne’s front doorbell and at 1901 he heard the light click of her heels on the floor inside. She was punctual, he had to say that for her.

John supposed he shouldn’t be surprised. Suzanne Barron was a businesswoman, after all, and a successful one at that. You don’t survive in business if you can’t meet a schedule.

He’d found the business world, in its own way, as demanding as the Navy.

John stood patiently outside the door, refraining from picking her locks and cutting through the alarm system out of pity. He’d made his point.

No, he stood outside her ridiculous excuse for a door and rang the bell, like a normal human male waiting for a female. To go out. Out on a date.

He supposed that’s how you do it. Man waits for woman outside door. His dating experience was pretty limited. Usually when he wanted sex he’d go to an off-base bar and cast his net until someone bit. Sometimes it took five minutes, sometimes ten.

The women weren’t looking for hearts and flowers and he wasn’t looking to give it to them.

Suzanne Barron was an entirely different matter. Getting into her bed was going to require some finesse and some dusting off of his rusty social skills. He was going to have to make some polite non-business-related conversation, something he rarely had with civilians.

Why couldn’t he just fast forward to the good part? He shrugged his shoulders under the cashmere overcoat that was part of his businessman disguise, wishing they were already in bed, recognizing how unusual it was for him to be so impatient.

He’d once hidden behind a boulder in the Sandbox for four days and four nights without moving a muscle to get a shot at one of Abdul Rasheem’s lieutenants. This itchy feeling was unlike him.

He was going to have to get through this evening. And probably a few other evenings after this one. Asking her out to dinner—out on dates—was necessary. There had to be something between meeting her and having sex. He couldn’t just say, “Let’s go to bed.” It didn’t work that way, not with ladies.