Ill Wind

I'd kill us both if I tried to go on much longer.

"We're stopping for the night," I a

David nodded. He had a little clip-on light on his book, and he was deep in the perils of one of John Grisham's lawyers. I wished he would get a little more interested in the prospect of spending the night in a hotel with a hot babe who owned a purple velvet suit, but apparently not happening.

I tried a hint. "Any preference? Trashy decor? Adult cha

He turned a page. "Indoor plumbing's a plus."

Bigger hint. "Two rooms or one?" I kept looking at the road and the sunset. In my peripheral vision, he still looked relaxed and unfazed, but he marked his place in his book and turned the light off.

"Kind of takes the mystery out of it if you ask," he said.

"Just thinking out loud."

"One's fine."

Well, that was an answer, but I wasn't getting the come-hither vibe. David was just about impossible to read, which was fu

Up ahead, the cool blue glow of a motel sign floated like a UFO above the road. Clean sheets, fluffy pillows, little complimentary soaps. It sounded like heaven. Up close, it looked a lot more like purgatory, but any afterlife in a storm.

I checked us in, getting absolutely no reaction from the walleyed clerk to any of my quips, and paid with my fast-dwindling supply of cash. I signed the slip and got the room key and went back out to the car. The chunky orange tag attached to the key said we were in room 128. It was, naturally, on the other side of the building, the dark side, where half the parking lot lights were dead and the other half terminally ill. I pulled Delilah up in a parking space directly in front of the door.

Well, one benefit to the place: it was quiet. Awesomely quiet. Nothing but the wind whispering through trees and rattling a stray plastic bag across the parking lot.

"Shall we?" I asked, and reached down to grab my duffel. David took out his heavy backpack and camping kit. I doubted he would need all of it, but I supposed living on the road makes you less than trusting about that kind of thing.

Once we were inside, my visions of gleaming chrome bathroom fixtures and deep-pile carpeting were crushed. The carpet was indoor-outdoor, the bathroom had last been upgraded in the 1950s, and the sad-clown prints on the walls could never have been remotely fashionable. But it had clean sheets, reasonably fluffy pillows, and (I saw during a fast reco

David leaned his backpack against the wall. "One bed," he said.

"Lucky for you, you brought camping gear." I flopped down on the bed and immediately felt gravity increase by a factor of ten. The mattress was old and sagged, but it still felt like a cloud under my aching back. "God, I could sleep for days."

The bed creaked. I hoisted one eyelid and saw that David had perched on the edge, looking down at me. In a perfect world, he would have been all choked up with romantic desire. In my all-too-real reality, he said, "You look terrible."

"Thanks," I murmured, and let my eye drift shut. "You charmer. Sheesh."

The bed creaked again, and I heard him rummaging in his backpack. Footsteps on the carpet. The bathroom door closed, and the shower started up with a stuttering hiss.

Sometime a few minutes later, the sound of ru

A flash of lightning, blue-white, outside the window.

It was coming for me—

I pulled awake with a gasp and found David tucking a scratchy blanket around me. I flailed my way out of it and stumbled to the window, ripped aside the curtains, and stared out at the dark.

Quiet. Quiet as the grave. No rain. No thunder. No lightning stabbing at me from above.

"What?" he asked.

It's looking for me, I wanted to say, but there was no way I could explain that sort of thing. I was so tired, I was incoherent, shaking, almost crying. It's out there.

"Did it rain?" I managed to ask.

"Don't think so. Maybe you heard the shower. You haven't been asleep long."

Oh. I remembered now. The shower. He'd been taking a shower.

When I turned around, I realized he was wearing nothing but a towel and some well-placed water drops, and it hit me with a cattle-prod jolt that he was absolutely, unquestionably gorgeous. Skin like burnished gold, and under it the best kind of muscles on a man—long, lean, defined without bulging. A gilded thatch of hair on his chest that narrowed to a line down his stomach, pointing the way under the towel.

"Oh," I blurted. "Wow. You—don't have much on."

"No," he agreed gravely. "I don't usually sleep in footie pajamas."

"Would it be too personal to ask what you do sleep in?"

"Pajama bottoms. Unless that bothers you."

Bothered me? Hell, yes. But in that nice, liquefying, warm-silk way of being bothered, as in "hot and."

"No," I said weakly. A drop of water glided down over his shoulder and melted into his chest hair. I had a fantasy so vivid, it raised my skin into goose bumps.

"Okay. You pla

"Um, no," I said, grabbed my duffel, and escaped to the bathroom.

Fu

I scrubbed myself pink, washed and strangled the water out of my hair, and wrapped myself in one of the motel's thin, stiff towels. Record time. I considered shaving my legs, decided no, reconsidered, and then managed to get depilated in under four minutes, with only one tiny little cut near my left ankle.

When I came out into the bedroom, the bed was empty. No David.

He was zipped into a sleeping bag on the floor.

I stood there, dripping and steaming, and said, "You're kidding."

He didn't open his eyes. "You've said that to me before. Do I really look that fu

"Bastard." I flopped down on the bed again, squirmed under the covers, and stripped off the towel beneath. "You made me get up for nothing."

"No," he corrected. "Now you're clean and you'll sleep better."

He turned over on his side, away from me. I wondered if he was naked inside the sleeping bag, growled in frustration, and put a pillow over my face. Suffocation had no appeal. I took it off and said, "You can bring your sleeping bag up here, you know. Beats sleeping on the floor."

He didn't answer for a few seconds, long enough for me to experience total rejection, and then he turned over and raised himself up on one elbow to look at me.

I expected some quip or some question, but he just looked. And then he flipped open the sleeping bag, slid out, and walked over to the bed.