Charlie All Night Read online

  And then his lips were on hers, and her mouth was warm and hot and sweet, and her lower lip slid against his tongue, and his entire being was in his mouth, finding her, at last.

  * * *

  Allie sat stunned as he kissed her, her head heavy on her neck, falling helplessly into him as his mouth moved on hers. His hand was gentle on her cheek, and he breathed into her mouth and she lived in his heat, moving her lips against his, letting the dizziness take her like a drug. And then he touched her lips with his tongue, and the air left her lungs as she sighed with surrender, only to gasp when he licked farther into her mouth, tangling with her tongue. She felt his kiss everywhere, in her breasts and her stomach and hotly between her legs, and she pressed her mouth back against his, spurred by the moan he made as she invaded his mouth.

  Then he pulled back, his breath coming heavily, and said, “I can’t stand this.” He kissed her hard once, quickly, and moved away from her, back into the booth, while she leaned on the desk and tried to breathe.

  “I’m sorry,” he said over the mike when the door was closed behind him. “I didn’t mean to. I just couldn’t-”

  “I’m not sorry,” she told him. “But, oh, God, Charlie-”

  “Go home,” he said, and here was an edge in his voice. “Go home. The rest is just music. I can’t talk to you anymore tonight. I can’t talk to anybody. Go home.”

  * * *

  After a week and a half of sleeping without Charlie, Allie was ready to surrender. It wasn’t the sex she missed so much, although she missed that so much she ached with it, it was Charlie. Charlie warm and laughing and safe and just there. She couldn’t even face Chinese food anymore without getting turned on and feeling lonely.

  They’d fought amiably over the end of Casablanca for that night’s program, and then Allie left the booth, and Charlie put “River of Dreams” on and she watched as he cuddled Sam to his chest and began to feed him. Sam was growing like a horse, getting into everything, and she’d caught Charlie lecturing him earlier about chewing on electrical cords. They’d looked so funny, the tiny puppy looking up earnestly from Charlie’s big hand, and Charlie scowling down at Sam, reasoning with him about electrocution, that she had to laugh. Charlie had looked up and grinned at her, and his grin hit her like a punch to the stomach.

  She missed him.

  This was a bad emotion, so she squelched it and went back to work, looking up again only when Charlie introduced a play for insomniacs. She could see Sam scampering over the console and Charlie reaching for him, tucking the squirming puppy under his chin while he punched up the next song. Then the Disney lullaby “Baby Mine” came up and he began to rock and pat Sam until the puppy curled up on his chest and went to sleep.

  Watching a man pat a puppy was no reason to fall in love.

  But she did, anyway, much against her better judgment and her will and her common sense. Not this, she thought. Not him. But there it was.

  The phone rang and she grabbed it, grateful for anything that distracted her from this new disaster. She didn’t want to be in love with anybody, especially not with Charlie I’m-Leaving-In-November Tenniel, especially not like this.

  “Charlie All Night,” she said into the receiver, and the caller said, “Yeah, let me talk to Charlie. I’m Doug.”

  The song ended and Allie said, “You have a caller. It’s Doug, on one,” and punched it in.

  Charlie shifted Sam to his shoulder and spoke into the microphone. “Hey, Doug, what’s up?”

  “Well, that’s what I was going to ask you. We were kind of wondering here why you keep playing ‘River of Dreams’ so much, and now a lullaby? We’d heard your station was wired, but this is weird.”

  She saw Charlie sit up. “Wired?”

  “Well, you know. What gives? You a Billy Joel freak?”

  Charlie relaxed a little. “Not me. We’ve got a puppy here at the station who wasn’t doing too well at eating until we put on ‘River of Dreams.’ He really likes the rhythm. He’s doing pretty good now, but we still play it once a night so he feels at home.”

  “You’re kidding. You got a dog there?”

  Allie watched Charlie look down at Samson and grin. “Well, you could stretch it and call Sam a dog, I guess. He’s more like a Twinkie with paws and an appetite. And he was tearing up the booth a minute ago, so I put the lullaby on. Knocked him right out.”

  “Try ‘Sweet Baby James’ man,” Doug said. “My kid goes right to sleep when we play that.”

  “Great idea.” Charlie moved Sam farther up on his shoulder and patted him as he stirred. “Maybe we should play a lullaby every night about this time. Put any kid who’s fighting it to sleep.”

  Charlie talked on with Doug about rock lullabies, and Allie watched him, hopeless with love, until a nasty thought intruded.

  He’d just announced the station had a dog to the listening public.

  Bill didn’t know the station had a dog. Beattie didn’t even know.

  They were in for another meeting.

  And she couldn’t even go home and crawl into bed with Charlie and talk about it.

  Charlie punched up a song and continued to talk to Doug off the air, and Allie took her glasses off and put her head down on her desk and tried to figure out how her life had gotten so screwed up when she’d been doing all the right things.

  * * *

  Bill tried to throw his usual fit about Sam, but Charlie knocked him off-balance by bringing the puppy to the meeting.

  “Good little dog,” Bill said gruffly when he met Sam. “Probably good publicity. What the hell, let him stay.”

  “How did you know he’d say that?” Allie asked him when they’d escaped unscathed.

  “Grady tipped me off,” he told her. “Evidently, Bill’s a sucker for dogs. Grady told me as long as Sam was in the room, Bill would fold.”

  “Well, good for Grady,” Allie said.

  Charlie lifted Sam up in front of his face and said, “You’re in, kid, don’t screw up,” and when Sam licked Charlie’s nose, he laughed. He laughed a lot more when Sam became the new Flavor of the Week after his picture showed up in the paper, and the local animal shelter called and asked to begin a This-Dog-Needs-A-Home segment the next week on Charlie’s show.

  They did still have a few problems. Somebody was still sabotaging the show, one night making crank calls that tied up the phone lines, the next swiping the ad tapes for the night. Charlie coped with all of it and avoided Allie like the plague, missing her so much that he couldn’t sleep at night, telling himself that once November came and he was out of town, she’d just be a pleasant memory.

  He kept telling himself that, but he didn’t believe it. And it was getting harder and harder to stay away from her.

  Charlie walked into the booth on Friday night, two days ifter he’d blown Sam’s cover, grouchy because he was in a booth and Allie was ten feet away on the other side of a glass wall wearing a pink sweater that made him crazy.

  Once inside the booth, though, he stopped in his tracks. “What is that god-awful smell?”

  “Well.” Harry leaned back in his chair. “It seems Mark got a dog.”

  “What?”

  “A dog,” Harry said. “At the pound. A Doberman-mix puppy. A man’s dog. Called him King.”

  Charlie sat down on the edge of the console. “I don’t believe this.”

  “And he brought King into the booth with him this morning so he could broadcast with him. Like we do with Samson. And after four hours, King scratched at the door to be let out.”

  Charlie snorted. “King obviously has a lot of stamina. I’d have been clawing at the door a lot sooner if I was trapped in a booth with Mark.”

  “But Mark ignored him, so King… uh, pooped.”

  Charlie grinned. “And then?”

  “Mark yelled at him and scared him.” Harry fought back a grin. “So King pooped again.”

  Charlie’s grin widened. “Mark is an idiot.”

  “So then Mark waved the s