“Here!” He held out the phone he’d pulled from his pocket. “Take mine, for Christ’s sake! I have four more!”

“No, thank you,” she said, in her snippiest tone.

He slid the phone into his pocket and studied her face with hypnotizing intensity. “There’s just one thing I need to know before I go,” he said. “Or I won’t sleep tonight.”

She tilted up her chin, trying to breathe. “Know what?”

He sank down onto one knee. “Don’t panic,” he soothed, as shocking erotic possibilities flashed through her mind. She shrank back, shocked, as he grasped her skirt—and lifted. Just a couple of inches. She quivered, trapped. She couldn’t retreat, with her back flat to the wall. “What are you doing?” she squeaked. “Let go of my skirt!”

He looked up with a triumphant grin. “Dimples.”

She wanted to sink into the ground. Oh, for willowy slender legs, like Nancy and Vivi. Having her chubby knees remarked upon by this guy, of all guys, was just too much to bear. “Oh, God. Get out of here.”

“No, no! They’re great. Really. I was hoping they’d have dimples.”

She shook her head. “I can’t handle this. Good night. Get lost.” She put all the commanding punch she could behind the word.

He rose slowly to his feet. Up, up, and still up. God, the guy was tall. And broad. And he smelled so seductively good, it was filling her senses. Scrambling her brain.

“You’re, ah—not moving,” she pointed out to him.

“No,” he agreed.

She tried to look stern. A tall order with that tremor in her mouth. “Why not?” she demanded.

He shrugged. “Because you don’t really want me to.”

The guy’s nerve was staggering. “Oh?” she snapped. “You read minds, do you?”

He shook his head, impassive. “No. I read faces, and bodies.”

She struggled for a moment with that. She was blushing hotly, which did not help her dignity one bit. “That’s very impressive,” she said primly. “But my face and body do not make the executive decisions around here.”

He leaned closer. “Of course they don’t.” His voice was a velvety, rumbling caress. “They have better things to do.”

She was still groping for a comeback when his lips touched hers.

She gasped at the sparkling rush of energy. The startled heat, unfurling through her body. Spreading out, like a rippling current of water. Too delicious to resist.

She rose up on tiptoe, and it all spun out of control. Before she knew it, she was pinned to the wall, kissing him madly. Forgetting everything except for how sweet, how good it felt. How much more she wanted, how bad she wanted it. He hooked her knee with his hand and pulled it up to clasp his muscular thighs, leaning against her so that the hot bulge at his groin pressed against her tender intimate places, in a slow, deliberate pulse that made her ache and squirm and moan.

His tongue slid inside her mouth, commanding and directing the kiss with implacable skill. His hand cupped her bottom, stroking.

She started to shake, terrified and disoriented. Something was spinning out of control. The heat, the light, the ache began to coalesce, sharpening, swelling into something huge and wild—

It burst, and her startled shriek was smothered against his hungry mouth. He held her tightly in his arms, while shudders of unbelievable, shocking pleasure wrenched through her entire body.

Her eyes fluttered open. His gaze burned her face. Her eyes were wet, her mouth couldn’t stop shaking. She couldn’t believe herself. A stranger? In her own stairwell? Her eyes shut against the pressure. So. That was what a screaming orgasm felt like. She’d always wondered.

He stroked her cheek gently, waiting. “Any new executive decisions coming down the pipeline?” he prompted softly.

All she wanted was to yank him inside. If this is what he could do to her fully clothed, in the stairwell—ah, God. It was too much.

Way, way too much. She shook her head. No. She mouthed the word. Had no breath to actually say it.

He stepped back, let go. “Sorry if I went too far,” he said. He turned, and headed slowly down the stairs. “Good night.”

She stayed there, immobile, until she heard the front door click far below. Then she fumbled with the keys, her hands trembling so hard she could barely hold them.

Once inside her apartment and the alarm armed, she sank down onto the ground as though her legs had no bones, and rocked, hands over her mouth. The keening sounds coming out of her made her throat ache and burn, as if a tuning peg were turning, ratcheting up the tension relentlessly, tighter, higher.

Furious with herself for being such a goddamn coward.

Duncan stared at the screen of the online version of The Golden Thread Poetry Journal and sent the pages to print. He reread the series of short lyric poems by Antonella D’Onofrio on the screen while the pages churned out of the machine. It was the tenth time he had read them.

He was baffled by them. Or rather, he was baffled by his reaction to them. It was complete gibberish, of course. He couldn’t figure out what the fuck she was getting at, for the life of him. But he liked the way the sequence of words made him feel. He kept rereading them, over and over. Grasping for that elusive feeling. Weird.

And the way it made his dick feel was a damn inconvenience. He stared down at his stubborn boner. He’d already tried to deal with the problem in the shower. Wild, hot water fantasies. Nell, naked and soaked and soapy, pinned to the shower wall, her legs draped over his arms. Whimpering with each deep, slick thrust. He’d come so hard, he practically knocked himself out, so why he should still have a tent pole in his sweats was beyond him. Had to be the poetry, he guessed.

He’d been at the computer since he’d gotten home. He was too wound up and turned on to sleep, so he’d used the time to research everything he could glean about the D’Onofrio saga that could be found on the Internet. He was champing at the bit to call his NYPD source and get some inside details on the case, but it was too early.

So he’d ranged further to pass the time. Reading articles she’d published in various literary journals, about Sara Teasdale, Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sappho. A paper for her graduate seminar. Then there was poetry she’d written and published herself. Guest blog entries on websites that catered to poets, scholars. Online poetry workshops that she critiqued. Outlandish stuff. And they said computer nerds were arcane and weird? Computer nerds had nothing on poets and scholars. This crap was from fucking outer space.

He glanced at his watch. Almost five a.m. Good enough. His friend and ex–comrade in arms was now a detective in the NYPD. Gant owed Duncan his life, from a number of bloody adventures they’d had back in Afghanistan. If he wasn’t awake by now, it meant he was getting soft.

He dialed the number. It rang twelve times before the guy picked up. “Who the fuck is this?” said Gant sleepily.

“I need some info,” he said.

“Oh, Christ. You. Couldn’t it wait till daylight?”

“It’s dawn,” Duncan said, staring out his picture window at the spectacular New York City skyline, silhouetted against the faint glow of breaking day. “I need the details of an ongoing police investigation, in Hempton. It involves an elderly woman named Lucia D’Onofrio. She died during a burglary in her house, of a heart attack. A few weeks ago.”

“Yeah? Why do you want to know?”

He leaned his hot forehead against the cool window glass, and hesitated. “Because I’m interested,” he hedged.

“Interested? You wake me up at this un-fucking-godly hour just because you’re interested?” Gant paused for a moment. “This is about a woman, right?”

“None of your goddamn business,” Duncan muttered.

“I knew this would happen,” Gant bitched. “You freak. Acting like a fucking monk, for years at a time. It was just a matter of time till you snapped. So it’s happened, huh? You’re obsessed? You’re awake at this hour because you spent the night Googling her life? Poor girl. She has no idea what she’s in for. So what does this chick have to do with the old broad who had the heart attack?”