Cynthia’s face was beginning to feel like an inferno. He was right. Long years of habit in a tough environment and climbing through the male trenches had left their mark on her. She’d never admit regretting the coarse words. But, damn, he was so disconcertingly attractive that he made her wish she was different. Really, how did a business executive with a desk job stay so fit? Before Cynthia could bite her tongue, she blurted out, “Do you fence?”
He frowned with confusion. “TVs and car stereos?”
“No, you idiot. Swordplay. Like épée, foil, saber.”
“Oh.” Now it was his turn to blush.
“Do you like to joust?”
“Like would be too strong a word.” His eyes glittered with amusement at some private joke.
“What’s that smirk supposed to mean?”
“Nothing, sweetheart. Nada. How did we get from you checking out my…uh, crest to swords? Oh, I get it…swords, scepters, phallic symbols.”
“Do you have a death wish?”
He grinned at her, and Cynthia’s sensory system went kaplooey, turning every erogenous zone in her body—even ones she never knew existed—on full red alert. How did he do that with just a slow, lazy twitch of the lips? More important, was it a deliberate ploy to divert her from her rightful anger? “Did you and Tricky Dick and the designer-chauffeur-geek plan this whole thing? Did you figure I would be more amenable to negotiating in a bed half-naked with you, rather than across a courtroom? Did you think my major fantasy in life was to get laid by Prince Charming? Do you have any idea how much trouble you are in, big boy?”
Ferrama was lying on one side. His left elbow, braced on the pillow, supported his head. He was staring at her in the oddest way.
“Stop it,” she demanded.
“Stop what?”
“Stop looking at me as if I was one of your island tarts.”
“What island?”
“Your island…your principality.”
“Oh, that island.” He smiled and reached out a hand to finger one of the curls in her big hair. “There aren’t any tarts on my island.”
She slapped his hand away. “Oh, so you limit your princely philandering to women outside your realm. Good idea.”
“Princely philandering? Where do you get these ideas?”
“I get these ideas from those smoldering looks you keep giving me. And you and I both know that a prince like you wouldn’t be the least bit attracted to a woman like me. Therefore, it’s a natural conclusion that you must do a lot of meaningless philandering.”
He crossed his eyes and shook his head like a shaggy dog. “Would you care to explain that bit of logic?”
“Listen, I’ve seen pictures of you in the society pages. You’ve always got some glamorous babe on your arm with a Riviera suntan and a spatoned, pencil-thin body.”
“And?”
“And, even if I baked myself on a beach for days, I would still have white skin and—”
“Creamy,” he corrected, running a forefinger along the bare skin of her forearm. He pulled his hand back quickly before she could slap it away again. “Your skin is deliciously creamy, not white.”
Boy, he is really good. If I weren’t as sharp as I am, I might even be pulled in by his snow job. “And I could jog till I dropped and I’ll never be anything but soft and curvy. Oh, don’t give me that look. Ultra-thin and ultra-hard bodies are in vogue today, don’t even try to deny it.”
“How many men do you know who read Vogue? Or care what some wacko French designer tells them is beautiful.” He let out a long sigh. “Ah, Cynthia, you have to know that I was attracted to you from the first minute I saw you picketing my building. Ask Dick. He’s been teasing me about my infatuation ever since.” He shrugged helplessly. “You are so damn beautiful.”
Me? Beautiful? “Don’t try that seduction routine on me, buster. You are such a frog.”
He winked. “Yeah, but if you kiss me hard enough, I turn into a prince.”
“Hah! I’ve kissed a few frogs in my time and, believe me, not a single one turned into a prince.”
“Try me,” he challenged.
Boy, was she tempted! “Give it up, Romeo. I’m on to you and all your slick ri-bet charm.”
He gave her a long, doleful look before confessing, “I’ve been looking for you my entire life, querida.”
Now that was a real low blow. The words every woman wanted to hear. And men knew that women wanted to hear them, so they spouted the magic words as if doling out candy. Cynthia couldn’t allow herself to succumb to the practiced words of a born-to-please womanizer. She put her hands to her ears and closed her eyes.
Once she felt herself under control, Cynthia, with eyes still closed, stormed at him, “Enough of this b.s. You are responsible for my kidnapping, whether directly or indirectly. What are you going to do about this situation? Don’t you think it’s time to cut your losses? There’s no shame in a man being thrown by a mare, you know. It’s better to be turned back in the middle of the ford than to be buried in the flood. So, what do you say? Shall we call an end to this charade?”
Silence.
With trepidation, she slowly opened her eyes. To her horror, she saw the prince’s eyes glued to her chest, where her breasts were arched outward under the revealing lace camisole, due to her upraised hands clamped over her ears. Instantly, she lowered her arms and crossed them over her offending bosom. “Did you hear what I said?” she squeaked out.
“No.”
“Why are you looking at me like that?” Dumb question. I practically invited the lech to ogle me with that stupid pose.
“You don’t want to know.” His eyes danced merrily before he blurted out, “How do you feel about aprons?”
“How do you feel about Lorena Bobbitt?”
“Ouch!” P.T. grumbled as he tripped over his chain for about the twentieth time.
“If you’d stop pacing, you wouldn’t trip over your own feet,” Cynthia observed.
“What the hell else is there to do?” For the past two hours he’d examined every inch of the Frick Suite (which he’d quickly nicknamed the Frickin’ Suite)—as far as his retractable chain would go…into the bathroom, as far as the door leading to the corridor, over to the window, in front of the VCR where, to his disgust, he found only Cinderella and Elvis Presley movies.
Earlier, he’d tried to chisel at the bolt securing his chain to the wall with a butter knife. He’d soon learned that his multitalented stepsister had installed an eight-inch toggle bolt into a secure-as-cement wall stud. Even worse, the bolt had some kind of wing unit on it that sprang free once the screw went all the way through the stud wall, thus ensuring that the fastener couldn’t be unscrewed or pulled out. It would take a stick of dynamite to break it loose.
“Testy, are we?” Cynthia remarked cheerily. “If the cat scratches you, don’t beat the dog.”
“I swear, one more Irish proverb and I’ll not only beat the dog, I’ll throw it out the window to join those other howling creatures down in the courtyard.” He gave Cynthia a piercing glower to let her know which dog he had in mind.
“If you think this is boring, wait till you’re here a few days. You might even let Ruth give you a makeover.”
“Not in this lifetime!” He cast her another glower. She sat at a round empire card table painting her fingernails to match her toes…a bright neon, glow-in-the-dark pink. Glow in the dark! That’s all he needed…another fantasy to add to his repertoire.
He could just picture the scene. Oh, Lordy, could he picture the scene!
A pitch-dark bedroom. Him sprawled on his back, naked as a jaybird. And ten luminescent ovals moving over his body like a bloody grand piano. Oh, yeah!
The erotic light show would start at his shoulders, pause at his flat male nipples, spend a second or two examining his navel and his flat stomach—his flat stomach was one of his best assets, if he did say so himself. He sucked said belly in, just thinking about how those fingertips would feel.
&n
bsp; Man, oh, man, this is the best non-sex I’ve ever had.
Okay, the little miniature flashlights were stalled at his midsection. Should they bypass the main event and trail on down his legs to the bottom of his very sensitive feet? It would give new meaning to “Happy Trails,” that’s for sure.
Nah! This was a male fantasy. Who needed all that foreplay when the organ was pumped and ready to play?
So, where was he? Oh, yeah, the ten dots of light were arranged around a column. Like a piccolo, not an organ, he decided—Geez, this prince persona must be going to my head if I’m being refined in my daydreams, using nicey-nice musical euphemisms, like organ and piccolo for my good ol’ Peter. Drawing himself back to the ten little lights positioned on Peter…uh, the piccolo, he decided they would resemble fireflies, moving up and down in a rhythmic, fluttery fashion like a lava lamp.
Oooh, oooh, oooh! Stop the action! Rewind the fantasy tape. He’d thought of something else. Something much, much better.
How about if she stopped touching him and, instead, straddled his body? She’d be naked, too, of course. He would know she was there because of the slight pressure of her buttocks on his upper thighs. And his engorged erection could actually feel the warmth coming from between her legs, even though they weren’t touching there…yet. He’d be able to see nothing…except for the ten lightning bugs making two increasingly smaller circles on her own upper body.
Oh, God! She’s touching her own breasts. For me. My own personal illuminated lap dance.
Now the lights were moving lower. A slow, sensuous journey intended to tease and tantalize before reaching the ultimate destination…the minuscule space separating him from her.
P.T. could think of about fifty different possibilities as to what would happen next…all of them excruciatingly hot and exciting. He smiled when his overworked brain settled on a particularly naughty one.
“What are you doing?”
Uh-oh! The voice that broke through P.T.’s reverie was sharp and cool, not hot and excited. Luckily, it came from behind him.
“Checking out the tape selection,” he replied in a strangled voice.
“Let me see,” she said. “Is there something I missed?”
Oh, yeah! Not in a million years was P.T. about to turn around now. Instead he clicked off the VCR and grabbed a stack of 45 records at random from a nearby pile. Soon Elvis was belting out one of his torch songs, something about a hunk of burning love.
P.T. understood perfectly.
So did Peter.
Chapter Seven
“It’s all your fault,” he said.
“It’s all your fault,” she said.
“You could end this now,” he persisted.
“So could you.”
“I’m offering you a sweetheart deal, sweetheart. Take it or leave it.”
“More like sweet ’n’ sour, sweetheart,” she shot back. “And a little heavy on the sour for my taste.”
Pretending to stop and study the cards in their hands, they both took deep breaths to calm their tempers. Three hours had passed since Ferrama had awakened. After alternating between rage and disbelief over their predicament, the prince had finally settled down to a slow simmer, waiting for Naomi to show her face again…which she’d wisely chosen not to do. That was no surprise to Cynthia, who’d grown accustomed to the wily witch’s evasive tactics. He’d suggested a game of two-handed rummy to pass the time. They were now in the midst of their third game, seated at the small empire card table near the window.
She could see his patience was wearing thin at her resistance to his feeble offers, as evidenced by the slight twitch in his clenched jaw and the pulsing vein in his forehead.
“All you’d have to do is sign my settlement offer, agree not to sue or file a criminal complaint, and we’d be back in Manhattan by dinnertime,” he advised in a surprisingly calm voice.
“Oh, is that all!” she said scornfully.
“Be reasonable, Cynthia.”
“Reasonable?” she retorted. “Number one, I wouldn’t sign a settlement offer now for twice my original demand. Secondly, someone’s going to jail for my kidnapping. And third, think O. J. when it comes to the size of the civil action you’ll be facing.”
“You can’t seriously consider this a real kidnapping,” he argued, rearranging the cards in his hands. He probably had another full house. She was working with a lousy pair of fives.
“It feels real to me.” She rearranged her cards, too, but no matter how she rearranged them, they were still bad. Her eyes kept going back to his lips as he spoke. He had really, really nice lips. Lips that gave a normally intelligent woman some really dumb ideas.
“I agree that Naomi has gone overboard, but Elmer and Ruth are harmless accomplices,” Ferrama continued. “Actually, this is more like a…well, a forced vacation.”
“Vacation? In chains?” she scoffed, then added, “You and Naomi ought to contact one of those national travel agencies. You’d make a mint. Bondage Vacations ‘R’ Us.”
“Sounds good to me.”
Seething, she thought for a moment about his defending Naomi and Elmer and came to a logical conclusion. “Aha! So, you admit it finally? You were in on this kidnapping scheme?”
He tossed out his discard and slanted her a disgusted scowl across the small table. “Are you loco? Would I willingly have myself knocked out and chained to a wall? Would I break the law in such a flagrant manner just before my company’s about to go public? Would I lock myself up with a”—he gave her a condescending once-over—“shark?”
That last barb really stung. And it was going to cost him. “Desperate situations make desperate men.”
“Desperate? Lady, I came here to rescue you. The least you could do is show a little appreciation.”
“Some rescue!” She glanced meaningfully around their strange prison.
He lifted his chin, affronted. “How was I to know Naomi had such a sadistic streak?”
“I still say you’re the mastermind of this moronic plot. Elmer told me he was giving you to me…as a gift. He said this was part of some grand plan.”
Ferrama’s hand stopped midway in its reach toward the deck. “He did?” Then his lips turned up in a slow smile. “I kind of like the idea of being your gift. But the least Elmer could have done was tell me ahead of time. I would have wrapped myself in a bow.” He continued the card game, chuckling now.
And she just knew he was imagining where he would have put that bow. “I think Elmer had visions of you being a knight in shining armor,” she said derisively, “charging up to the castle doors to save his lady love.”
“That makes sense.”
“It does?”
“Well, I am a prince.” He batted his princely lashes at her.
He didn’t fool her. The dolt still thought he could seduce her into an easy settlement with one of those sultry looks of his.
Well, she was unseduceable.
She hoped.
“A prince who fell in the moat,” she reminded him mockingly.
“That could happen to any knight. Perils of the profession.”
“A prince whose white destrier is an orange truck. Now I ask you, what kind of prince drives an orange trunk?” She’d seen it earlier, when she’d leaned out the window to get a breath of fresh air while he’d been conked out.
“It’s burnished-damn-umber,” he grumbled.
“No way. Some car salesman sure saw you coming. Umber is yellowish brown. That redneck heap is either rusting badly or it’s orange. I saw it parked in the bailey.”
“The bay leaf?” he asked, homing in on the most irrelevant part of her remark. Probably a diversionary tactic to deflect her attention from his stupidity.
“Not bay leaf, you numskull. Bailey. That’s what Naomi calls the courtyard.”
“Aaargh! This conversation has veered so far off course, I can’t remember where it started.” He glared at her as if she’d committed said crime deliberately. “Hell, consider m
y truck a pumpkin coach, for all I care. Maybe Elmer threw fairy dust on me to addle my brain so I’d buy a vehicle that fit in with his delusional machinations.”
“Hmmm. You might have something there. If Elmer could give me a corn, why not a pumpkin pickup for you?”
“Elmer gave you the corn?” he asked incredulously.
“Uh-huh. And he told me he was my fairy godfather. Like Cinderella.”
“You? Cinderella?” He made a most insulting snort of disbelief.
“Hey, Prince Less-Than-Charming, watch where you cast stones.”
He grinned.
And that made her even madder.
“Now that I think about it, the whole picture is beginning to fit,” he mused. “I’m a prince. You’re a princess…well, a Wall Street princess. There are two wicked stepsisters. And a fairy godfather.” The grin turned into a full-blown smirk. “It works for me.” He paused a moment before adding, “When do we get to the good part?”
“And that would be what…the ball?” She tossed back her crisis-de-coiffure hair, feigning a lack of offense at his teasing. Wall Street Princess, indeed!
“Nah! I say we skip the costume dance and move this show to the nitty-gritty.” He paused dramatically before announcing, “I vote for Prince Charming doing the deed with Cinderella.”
“Ferrama, you need to go back to royal charm school.” She ought to be angry, but laughter bubbled to the surface at his outrageous nerve.
He pretended to be insulted, but then he burst out laughing, too.
Finally, she wiped tears of mirth from her eyes with a tissue. “Admit you planned this fiasco. Come on. I might give you a few points for honesty.”
“Carramba!” He exhaled loudly with exasperation. “The first I heard about this kidn…uh, incident was last night. As I’ve told you innumerable times now, my midnight dinner date at Lutèce was interrupted by the unfortunate news of your…um, trip to the Catskills.”
“Trip? You can put any spin you want on this, buster, but kidnapping is kidnapping.” She picked up a card from the deck, studied her rotten hand, then discarded, not even bothering to bluff. “Lutèce, huh? Who was your date, some princess?” Cynthia had agreed to play cards with Ferrama in the hope she could wheedle some information out of him. Normally, she was a pretty good card player, but it was rather difficult to play cards or carry on a normal discussion when there was nowhere to look except at a big canvas of dark masculine skin and muscle. At least that was the excuse she gave herself for her poor gambling skills today.