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  Her eyes were sultry, her lips swollen and pouty from his kisses, her dark hair tumbling over her shoulders. He watched her expression tighten with desire as she moved slowly up and down on him, her eyes closing even more. “Just for that,” she murmured, “I get to be on top.”

  He reached overhead and caught the headboard, his powerful biceps flexing as his fists locked around the brass bars. “No matter how I beg and plead?”

  “No matter what you say,” she assured him, and gasped herself as her movements wrenched another spasm of pleasure from her nerve endings.

  “Good.” Quinlan arched, almost lifting her off the bed. “Then I won’t accidentally say something that will make you quit.”

  He didn’t. When she collapsed, exhausted, on his chest, they were both numb with pleasure. He thrust his hand into her tangled hair and held her almost desperately close. She inhaled the hot, musky scent of his skin, and with the slightest of motions rubbed her cheek against the curly hair on his chest. She could feel his heart thudding under her ear, and the strong rhythm was reassuring. They slept again, and woke in the afternoon with the sun going down in a blaze of red and gold, to drowsily make love again.

  He got up to turn on the television sitting on her dresser, then returned to bed to hold her while they watched the news, which was, predictably, all about the blackout. Elizabeth felt a little bemused, as if a national crisis had passed without her knowing about it, even though she had been intimately embroiled in this one. Intimately, she thought, in more ways than one. Perhaps that was why she felt so out of touch with reality. She hadn’t spent the past twenty-four hours concentrating on the lack of electricity, she had been concentrating on Quinlan.

  The Great Blackout, as the Dallas newscasters were calling it, had disrupted electrical services all over the Sun Belt. The heat wave, peak usage and solar flares had all combined to overload and blow circuits, wiping out entire power grids. Elizabeth felt as if her own circuits had been seriously damaged by Quinlan’s high-voltage lovemaking.

  He spent the night with her. He didn’t ask if he could, and she didn’t tell him that he couldn’t. She knew that she was only postponing the inevitable, but she wanted this time with him. Telling him about Eric hadn’t changed her mind, any more than knowing about Eric had changed Quinlan’s basic character.

  When morning came, they both knew that the time-out had ended. Reality couldn’t be held at bay any longer.

  “So what happens now?” he asked quietly.

  She looked out the window as she sipped her coffee. It was Saturday; neither of them had to work, though Quinlan had already talked to a couple of his staffers, placing the calls almost as soon as he’d gotten out of bed. She knew that all she had to say was one word, “Stay,” and they would spend the weekend in bed, too. It would be wonderful, but come Monday, it would make it just that much more difficult to handle.

  “I don’t see that the situation has changed,” she finally said.

  “Damn it, Elizabeth!” He got up, his big body coiled with tension. “Can you honestly say that I’m anything like Landers?”

  “You’re very dominating,” she pointed out.

  “You love me.”

  “At the time, I thought I loved him, too. What if I’m wrong again?” Her eyes were huge and stark as she stared at him. “There’s no way you can know how bad it was without having lived through it yourself. I would rather die than go through anything like that again. I don’t know how I can afford to take the chance on you. I still don’t know you, not the way you know me. You’re so secretive that I can’t tell who you really are. How can I trust you when I don’t know you?”

  “And if you did?” he asked in a harsh tone. “If you knew all there is to know about me?”

  “I don’t know,” she said; then they looked at each other and broke into snickering laughter. “There’s a lot of knowing and not knowing in a few short sentences.”

  “At least we know what we mean,” he said, and she groaned; then they started laughing again. When he sobered, he reached out and slid his hand underneath her heavy curtain of hair, clasping the back of her neck. “Let me give something a try,” he urged. “Let me have another shot at changing your mind.”

  “Does this mean that if it doesn’t work, you’ll stop trying?” she asked wryly, and had to laugh at the expression on his face. “Oh, Tom, you don’t even have a clue about how to give up, do you?”

  He shrugged. “I’ve never wanted anyone the way I want you,” he said, smiling back just as wryly. “But at least I’ve made some progress.

  You’ve started calling me Tom again.”He dressed and roughly kissed her as he started out the door. “I’ll be back as soon as I can. It may not be today. But there’s something I want to show you before you make a final decision.”

  Elizabeth leaned against the door after she had closed it behind him. Final decision? She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. To her, the decision had been final for the past six months. So why did she feel that, unless she gave him the answer he wanted, she would still be explaining her reasons to him five years from now?

  CHAPTER NINE

  The doorbell rang just before five on Sunday morning. Elizabeth stumbled groggily out of bed, staring at the clock in bewilderment. She had finally set the thing, but surely she had gotten it wrong. Who would be leaning on her doorbell at 4:54 in the morning?

  “Quinlan,” she muttered, moving unsteadily down the hall.

  She looked through the peephole to make certain, though she really hadn’t doubted it. Yawning, she released the chain and locks and opened the door. “Couldn’t it have waited another few hours?” she asked grouchily, heading toward the kitchen to put on a pot of coffee. If she had to deal with him at this hour, she needed to be more alert than she was right now.

  “No,” he said. “I haven’t slept, and I want to get this over with.”

  She hadn’t slept all that much herself; after he’d left the morning before, she had wandered around the apartment, feeling restless and unable to settle on anything to do. It had taken her a while to identify it, but at last she had realized that she was lonely. He had been with her for thirty-six hours straight, holding her while they slept, making love, talking, arguing, laughing. The blackout had forced them into a hothouse intimacy, leading her to explore old nightmares and maybe even come to terms with them.

  The bed had seemed too big, too cold, too empty. For the first time she began to question whether or not she had been right in breaking off with him. Quinlan definitely was not Eric Landers. Physically, she felt infinitely safe and cherished with him; on that level, at least, she didn’t think he would ever hurt her.

  It was the other facet of his personality that worried her the most, his secrecy and insistence on being in control. She had some sympathy with the control thing; after all, she was a bit fanatic on the subject herself. The problem was that she had had to fight so hard to get herself back, how could she risk her identity again? Quinlan was as relentless as the tides; lesser personalities crumbled before him. She didn’t know anything about huge chunks of his life, what had made him the man he was. What if he were hiding something from her that she absolutely couldn’t live with? What if there was a darkness to his soul that he could keep under control until it was too late for her to protect herself?

  She was under no illusions about marriage. Even in this day and age, it gave a man a certain autonomy over his wife. People weren’t inclined to get involved in domestic “disputes,” even when the dispute involved a man beating the hell out of his smaller, weaker wife. Some police departments were starting to view it more seriously, but they were so inundated with street crime, drug and highway carnage that, objectively, she could see how a woman’s swollen face or broken arm didn’t seem as critical when weighed in that balance.

  And marriage was what Quinlan wanted. If she resumed a relationship with him, he might not mention it for a while—she gave him a week, at the outside—but he would be as relen