Fortune's Heirs: Reunion: Her Good Fortune / A Tycoon in Texas / In a Texas Minute

She clutched at his arm, staring up at the ceiling. “What was that?”

“Maybe the power trying to come back on,” he lied. He was beginning to feel a little uneasy himself, but not because of the small space. His unease came from having her so close to him. From the fact that she seemed to fill up every space with her essence.

Her breathing was audible now. “Or the cables about to snap.”

“Not going to happen,” he assured her. “There’s emergency equipment that comes on as an auxiliary fail-safe measure.” He searched for a way to explain what he was saying so that it would penetrate the fog of fear crowding her brain. “Each floor has what amounts to brakes that come out and stop the car from plunging down to the ground floor.”

She didn’t look as if she believed him. Maybe she had already gone into shock, he thought. What the hell were you supposed to do with a person in shock? Keep them moving? Have them lie down?

He decided to compromise. Jack slipped his arm around her shoulders. “Sit down,” he instructed quietly. “Take a deep breath and hold it.”

But she shook her head, her hair flying from side to side. “I can’t. My lungs feel like they’re going to explode.”

If she kept on breathing like that, she was going to hyperventilate. He couldn’t let that happen. Desperate for a solution, he let his instincts take over. Instincts born of inspiration, of need and, perhaps, of more than a touch of desire.

Jack brought his mouth down to hers.

At first she struggled against him, not because she didn’t want to kiss Jack but because she couldn’t get enough air into her lungs.

But then her breathing began to regulate itself as the center of her attention slowly shifted from the very real fear that, despite his assurances about the emergency fail-safes that had been put in when the elevators were installed, they were going to fall to their deaths, crushed inside a silvery coffin.

Instead, her focus turned to the kiss that was swiftly setting fire to the very blood in her veins.

Panic abated in increments.

Gloria felt herself being pressed against him, felt the length of his body imprint itself onto hers. Felt her response as desire, hidden behind thin bamboo walls, broke through, seizing her. Making her tighten her arms around him.

Her heart was pounding, but for an entirely different reason than before.

He’d meant only to divert her. To keep her from hyperventilating. He hadn’t meant to get caught up in what amounted to an unorthodox first-aid application. Not like this. To make matters worse, she’d just shared something with him that had brought back memories he didn’t want to deal with, that made him relive Ann’s last days.

Maybe that was it. Maybe that had made him vulnerable.

And maybe it was none of the above. Maybe it just had to do with the woman in his arms. The woman he’d had an underlying yearning for since the first moment she had looked up at him with those incredible soft-brown eyes, turning his stomach to jelly and nearly turning his mind to mincemeat.

Kissing her only made him want her with a fierceness that was every bit as overwhelming as the claustrophobia he knew she was wrestling with.

Suddenly he realized that he had to step back, had to get air himself. Logic demanded that he try to clear his head.

But he didn’t want to.

Didn’t want to give up this wild surge that was pulsating through him, forging a path through his body. Making him aware of himself as a man.

He hadn’t wanted, truly wanted, a woman since Ann had died, leaving him to wander emotionally isolated in this world. Oh, there had been biological needs since then, but he could always separate himself from them, step outside his body and watch as he went through the physical motions of having sex, his mind absent from the process.

Right now his mind was in full attendance and there was no separating anything. The logic that always presided over his life had somehow gotten lost.

Nothing mattered except that he wanted to make love with Gloria. Wanted to get lost within her as they kept the world at arm’s length.

This wasn’t like her, not anymore, Gloria kept telling herself. She didn’t do things like this anymore: give up who and what she was with an abandonment that was so swift it all but jarred her very teeth. But all those encounters that had taken place in her past had been governed by inebriation. Her brain had always been liberally soused, the ability to think lost inside of a bottle.

But not this time.

She was stone-cold sober, drunk only on this sensation that was vibrating through her like the strings of a harp that had been plucked. She was drunk, but only on the idea of making love.

When his hands caressed her, Gloria moaned audibly, wanting him to touch her everywhere. To both soothe and stoke the fire that his nearness had created.

Gloria sucked in her breath. She felt his wide, capable hands delving beneath the blouse she’d pulled free earlier.

“You’re trembling,” he whispered, his breath warm on her neck.

He was going to pull away. She could feel it. She couldn’t let that happen. Without admitting it, she knew where this was going. Needed this to go there. Needed him to make love with her.

“This isn’t the time to withdraw,” she breathed, pressing harder against him.

Jack felt completely, hopelessly, lost. The willpower he thought was second nature had somehow turned into so much sawdust. If she’d backed away, cried, asked him to stop, then maybe the willpower he’d treasured could have been resurrected. But every indication she gave him was that she wanted this as badly as he did.

He hadn’t the strength to back away, to leave her of his own accord.

Still, he watched her eyes in the dim light for signs of fear, or mounting panic that had to do not with the enclosed space, but with what was happening.

Instead of fear, he saw desire.

Desire that mirrored exactly what was going on inside of him. He knew this was wrong. Clear-thinking adults didn’t make love suspended above the twentieth floor of a skyscraper that had been pitched into darkness. He didn’t make love like this. Mindlessly, and with complete abandonment.

Hell, he hadn’t made love since Ann died. He’d had sex. And each time had left him completely unsatisfied. Not wanting more, just wanting something. Something that wasn’t there.

Something that whispered to him now. Making every fiber within his body yearn.

With swift, sure movements, Jack pulled her blouse away from her shoulders, pressed his lips to every inch of her soft flesh as it was exposed. His own breathing became as labored as hers.

His fingers worked the clasp that held her bra in place.

When she shivered against him as the lacy material fell away, he felt a volley of passion being fired through him that all but turned his body rigid with desire. He slid the button holding her skirt together out of its hole, then pulled it from her.

The dimness caressed her like a familiar lover. His gaze passed over her. Gloria was wearing nothing but heels and underwear. His stomach pressed itself against his spine.

Gloria could feel anticipation vibrating throughout her whole body, priming her for the final moment that she both craved and wanted to hold at bay so that she could savor the approach of the final moment. It felt as if her whole body was humming.

She forced her breathing to grow steadier, as if that would somehow keep her hands from shaking as she swiftly yanked his custom-made jacket and pants off of him.