Unzipped (2 page)

“Guess that depends on what you got in your head,” he said. “But hey, the day’s almost over, and this’ll help, huh?”

“I beg your pardon?” I said, and he raised his hand. I noticed for the first time that he held the neck of a velvet bag that looked as if it might contain a bottle of wine.

“My doctor said a shot an evening would do me good.”

“Ahhh.” I couldn’t think of anything more clever to say. This was a new one on me.

“And it looks like you could use some, too.” He stepped into my office and took two water glasses from the tiny table that stood below the Ansel Adams reproduction. I wasn’t a particular fan of Mr. Adams, but the print had been free and added to the airy panache of the place. “Chic environmentalist,” it said. Or maybe “too broke to buy more stuff.” But the office was small and didn’t need a lot of clutter, I’d told myself. Bomstad took up most of the available space anyway. He extended a glass toward me. His hand was the approximate size of my head.

“I’m afraid the board frowns on fraternizing with clients,” I said, imagining what the board would actually do if I shared a drink with him. Tar and feathers came to mind, but maybe that was being unfair. Maybe they’d go straight to lethal injection and not fiddle around with poultry.

“I won’t tell ’em if you don’t,” Bomstad said as I settled into the rollered chair on the far side of my desk.

“No, thank you, Mr. Bomstad. But it’s kind of you to offer.” Gosh, I sounded professional.

He raised his brows and laughed. For a second I wondered why, but he was a nice guy with a great smile and an even better body. And after the men I’d been seeing for the past . . . oh . . . decade or so, it was fun just looking at him. Not that I was interested in him for myself, mind you. The California Board of Psychology may frown on drinking with clients, but they’d grind me into pâté and serve me on whole wheat crackers if they found out I’d boinked one.

“You don’t mind if I imbibe, I hope.”

“No. Go ahead,” I said. The truth was, I wasn’t sure what the rules were about clients drinking during a session, but it seemed harmless enough to me.

He slipped the neck of the chilled bottle out of its burgundy bag. A small note dangled from the smooth green glass. It was Asti Spumante—my favorite. An odd coincidence, I thought, settling back into my chair as he poured.

“So how was your week?” he asked. Setting the bottle on the floor, he lowered himself to the couch.

I swiveled my chair toward him. “It was fine. How about yours?”

“A little hairy. Stocks are down.”

“Are they?” Maybe I would have known that if I owned stocks. As it was most of my funds went to pay outdated school bills and a pessimistic banker. I owned an antiquated little cottage up in the valley. The yard looked like a rattlesnake habitat, Schwarzenegger would have struggled to wrestle the garage door into submission, and the entire place needed full time attention from a handy man with a sense of humor, but the house was mine, and I hoped to keep it that way.

“You don’t worry about the market?” Bomstad asked.

“Not unless I’m making soup,” I said.

He remained silent a moment, then laughed. Perhaps he wasn’t the sharpest pin in the cushion, but I was hardly in a position to find fault. Remember Brian?

“So did your mother come down for a visit?” I asked to start the ball rolling. Mothers are always an issue, but for a man with an impotency problem . . .

“Yeah,” he said, sipping his wine. “She came. Stayed for four days, then flew off to Seattle to yank my sister’s chain. You sure you don’t want a drink?”

“No, thanks.” I really did. It’s not as if I’m a big drinker. My weaknesses generally run toward chocolate and Virginia Slims, but a glass of wine would go well after my last session. I wondered how Mrs. Lepinski ever managed to face the day sober. “So did you get a chance to talk to her?”

“Mom?” he said, then finished his glass in one gulp and poured more.

Wow.

“Yes, your mother. Remember? We discussed confronting her about how she treated you as a child. That perhaps her . . . insensitivity had something to do with your current problems.” The woman was a card-carrying psychopath if half of what Andrew said was true. And I had no reason to think it wasn’t.

He drank again, sighed, and settled his head back against the overstuffed cushion of my ivory-toned couch—homey but stylish. “My impotency, you mean?” I was surprised he said the word aloud. Most men would have been more embarrassed by such a disclosure, but Bomstad was a different breed. His blue eyes were soulful. His hair, combed in a perfect but casual do, gleamed like gold in the fluorescent light. His features were broad but lean, and his fingers on the heavy crystal were blunt, scrubbed clean, and square-nailed.

“That and other things,” I said, trying to make light of it. Impotence is hell on men, I guess.
“It drains them of their self-worth, often causing them to draw into themselves when they most need the support of others.”
Or so the textbooks said. Regardless of that, however, I thought the board probably wouldn’t understand if I told them I took him to bed in my ever-increasing desire to help a client rid himself of such a debilitating problem.

“Don’t you never get tired of talking about other people’s troubles?” Bomstad asked and turned his head slightly. The tendons in his wide, suntanned throat pulled tight as he looked at me. His eyes were ultra blue and as sensitive as an angel’s—a gentle soul in a gladiator’s finely sculpted body. The kind of guy who could win the Super Bowl, cook a five course meal, then round off the evening by jotting down his deepest emotions in his tattered journal.

He had told me about his diary on more than one occasion. Originally, it had been my idea that he record those moments that were most important to him, but he assured me with a boyish spark of enthusiasm that he’d been doing so for years.

Since that day, I had filled many a spare evening with the thought of him sitting in front of his hearth, maybe on a bear rug, shirtless, of course, after a grueling day on the battlefield. His golden hair would gleam in the firelight as he bent over a leather bound notebook.

I had asked him if he’d like to share his diary with me sometime, for professional reasons only, of course. And he’d said he’d maybe like that, once we got to know each other better.

I stifled a girly sigh and brought myself back to the present.

“You must have problems of your own,” he said and caught my gaze. “Don’t you need to share them sometimes?”

I knew I should bring the conversation back to business. I knew it beyond a shadow of a doubt, but I felt something stir deep in my belly. It might have been hunger, but I had a bad feeling it had something to do with my glands, so I cleared my throat, shuffled some papers, and imagined being smeared with tar as the smell of chicken feathers filled my nostrils. “But it’s my job to address
your
problems,” I said, maintaining an admirably steady tone and managing to keep a good four feet of air space between us.

“But don’t you ever just wanna . . .” He shrugged and lifted his glass. “Let your hair down?”

I could imagine the feel of those blunt fingers against my scalp, skimming through the heavy waves of my mahogany hair as it slipped from its stylish coif to my shoulders.

But wait a minute! The purple images screeched to a halt. Maybe I was thinking of a romance novel. My own hair was confined to the back of my head with enough hair spray to stick a cat to the wall. It was straight as a stick, tended to be overly fine and, without the assistance of Madame Clairol, strongly resembled the color of dirt. “Perhaps we should confine our discussion to your problems, Mr. Bomstad.”

“You must have problems, too.”

“But I’m not paying you a hundred and fifty dollars an hour to discuss them.”

He laughed again. The sound was deep and tantalizingly masculine. My stomach did a funny little double loop. “Maybe I’d listen for free.”

I sighed internally. It took me a minute to recognize the sound, but when I did I gagged it with manic haste and straightened in my chair. “That’s very nice of you,” I said, pretty sure my polite but dismissive expression was firmly back in place. “But I can’t help you if you don’t—”

“You’ve already helped me.”

“I have?”

He glanced down. He exhibited endearingly boyish expressions sometimes, as if he couldn’t quite meet my eyes.

“Immensely,” he said, and raised his gaze.

“I’m glad to hear that. Still, I think—” I began, but then he brushed his jacket aside.

My eyes popped like peeled grapes and my jaw ricocheted off my desk top. There, between the spread edges of his jacket, I saw that his jeans were unzipped. He wore no underwear and voilà . . . it looked as if that impotency problem was pretty much taken care of.

“Well?” he said. I raised my attention with a jerky effort. His elbows were propped casually across the back of my couch as he watched me. He grinned. “What do you think?”

“Damn,” I croaked. “I’m good.”

He chuckled and rose slowly to his feet, a big man fast losing his boyish demeanor. “Yeah, you are,” he said, “and I’d like to thank you.”

“You could double my pay,” I suggested and rolled my chair cautiously backward. It was one thing to fantasize about an illicit affair with a hunky client. It was quite another to have that fantasy unzip in front of God and everybody.

“That’s not the kind of payment I had in mind, Doc,” he said, and placed his hands on the edge of my desk.

“As I’ve told you before, Mr. Bomstad, I prefer to be called Ms. McMullen.” I sounded like I was lecturing a twelve-year-old. Or giving an order to the bartender. Not at all like I was talking to a guy whose genitalia was draped over my desk like berries on a vine.

“Whatever,” he said. “You done good, and now I’d like to do a little something for you. Or should I say . . . a big something?” Removing one hand from my desk, he brushed his jacket aside again.

Crimony! It may have been smaller than a bread basket, but it blew a button all to hell.

He smiled as I stared. “I’ll lock the door so we ain’t disturbed.”

It was those words that set the alarms exploding in my head. I reached for the phone, and his hand, still large and clean and square-nailed, thumped suddenly atop mine.

“Who you calling?”

I glanced up. The boyish expression had been replaced by something less appealing. My stomach pitched.

“I think you’d better leave, Mr. Bomstad.” My voice was still steady, but my knees were bumping together like wind chimes gone mad.

“Leave?” he said, and wrapping his fingers about my hand, eased around the corner of the desk. I rose to my feet. I’ve never considered myself weak, but all things are relative. “After you done such good work?”

My heart was banging against my ribs and my head felt feather-light. “I’m flattered that you attribute your umm . . . newfound health to my services,” I said, “but I’m afraid I still must insist that you leave.”

He grinned and edged closer. “I like to hear you talk.” I could feel the heat of his body now, and my own temperature rose so that my face felt hot. “All slick and high-class, but I wonder . . .” He touched me with his knuckles, brushing them against my cheek. “I wonder what you’re like when you get riled.”

“My secretary will be returning any minute.” It was an out-and-out lie and not a very good one, apparently, because Bomstad didn’t even acknowledge it.

“Always dressed so classy.” He ran a hand over my shoulder. “Always smell so good.” He leaned in, taking a deep breath near my neck. “But sometimes I think there might be a touch of animal in you. A little white trash.” Bending his neck, he nipped at my throat. I was no longer sighing.

“Let go of my wrist,” I warned. The words only warbled a little.

He grinned. “There’s a stain on your blouse,” he said, gazing down at my breasts but not loosening his grip. “Almost hidden. What else you got hidden, Doc?” Raising his free hand, he brushed his fingers down my throat, pressing my blouse aside during his descent. I shivered as he touched the slope of my breast.

“You like that, Doc?”

No, I didn’t like it. Only a moron would like it, but I closed my eyes and dropped my head back slightly. A moan would have been a nice touch, but acting’s not my talent. Still, I didn’t need that extra drama, because apparently Bomstad was a big believer in his own overwhelming charm.

“Been a while for you, has it, Doc?”

I said nothing, but forced my muscles to relax.

“Good thing the Bomber took you up on your offer, huh?”

“Offer?” I opened my eyes, but kept my body carefully pliant.

He chuckled again. “Little late to be playing hard to get now, ain’t it?” he asked. “Little late when the Bomber is all hot and ready.” He slipped his hand inside my bra, cupping my breast.

I gasped. My stomach heaved. What would happen if I hurled on his perfectly polished shoes?

“You like that?”

Like porcupines in my underwear, but I forced a sigh. It sounded more like a growl to me, but he didn’t seem to notice, because he stepped forward.

I struck immediately, snapping my knee up with all the strength I could muster.

But even in his current state Bomstad had a professional athlete’s reflexes. My blow made only minimal contact with his newly regenerated area before it was deflected by a tree-sized thigh. Still, he stumbled backward, holding his offended parts and cursing.

I didn’t wait to enrich my vocabulary but bolted around the other side of my desk and dashed for the door. My hand closed over the doorknob, but there was a growl behind me and I was snatched away and flung across the room. I scrambled for footing, lost a shoe, and bounced off a wall, but I was still free and sprinted behind my desk, my breath coming hard.

“Don’t do this, Andrew,” I panted. “You’ll regret it.”

He was breathing hard, too. Still bent, he stalked me. “You’re a tease is what you are, Doc.”

“I’m not a tease,” I said, searching wildly for my professional voice. “I’m sorry if you got the wrong impression.”

“No wrong impressions,” he said and lunged forward, grappling across my desk.