Page 13 of Bedroom Therapy

Sitting at the restaurant table, he silently admitted that he’d admired the way she’d recovered from her shock at seeing him rummaging in her bedroom drawer. She had guts. But what if he’d really been a pervert? Then she should have gotten the hell out of the house. But she’d stood her ground.

He should warn her about that the value of cutting and running when you were in a tight situation. Only he wasn’t going to get a chance. He’d be going back to New Jersey tomorrow. Back to work, because he’d finished what he needed to do down here.

The problem was, he didn’t love the work. He liked being a cop a lot better. But he’d changed his profession to please his wife. He’d opened his own one-man agency, and taken whatever assignments walked in the door because he and Mindy had needed the money. Then the marriage had blown up in his face, and he’d just drifted along doing the same old thing.

But he’d been thinking recently that he was ready to go back to the police force. He wanted more challenging assignments. Stuff that was more worthwhile than getting the goods on cheating husbands and wives or people working insurance scams. Like this murder investigation, for example. Not that many murders cases came his way. This was the most exciting job he’d had in a couple of months.

Or maybe it was Amanda that was exciting him. He wished to hell he could tell the difference.

After paying for his meal, he killed some time by driving around the small Eastern Shore town. As he headed west, he thought about going back to O’Neal’s house and checking to see if that white van was there again—until he pictured her catching him driving past.

With a shake of his head, he went back to his hotel and paid for a movie that he hoped would distract him.

He picked a guy flick, with plenty of action. Then the hero climbed into bed with a beautiful spy, and Zach found himself getting hot as he put himself and Dr. O’Neal into the bedroom scene.

He moved his shoulder uncomfortably on the bed, thinking there was no reason he couldn’t do something about the hard-on straining behind the fly of his slacks.

Hadn’t Amanda O’Neal given him permission to enjoy his sexuality—any way that worked for him?

But he couldn’t get her image out of his mind. It was almost like she was standing there beside the bed, watching him. And he wasn’t going to jerk off in front of her.

When his gaze flicked back to the television, he found that a truck full of explosives was about to crash into a nuclear power plant. Good, that should prove sufficient distraction to take his mind off the lower part of his body.

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Amanda had made herself a tuna salad for dinner, but she’d finally put most of the meal into the refrigerator. If she’d been at Harmons College, she would have called one of her girlfriends and gone out to dinner and maybe a movie. Her friend Jane Baxter in the Sociology department or Carolyn Martin who was also in Psychology. They would have discussed the whole thing. Zach. The murder case. Her reactions. His reactions. Maybe she’d even have been able to laugh about the vibrator.

She’d had a pretty good support system at the college. Until the scandal had made a lot of people start avoiding her. Well, not Jane and Carolyn. She’d been the one to avoid them because she’d been too down on herself. And she’d silently argued that she didn’t want the scandal to rub off on them. Now she wished she hadn’t broken the ties. But she couldn’t just call them out of the blue because she had a guy to discuss. She was on her own.

To fill the time, she went back to the column. Beth had asked her how it was coming, and she’d said she was almost ready to turn it in. Now she had to make that claim a reality.

But she found it more difficult to concentrate than she had that afternoon, because when she’d put away the vibrator, picking it up had made her previous arousal return. Only now there was nothing she could do about it. When she lay down on the bed, she couldn’t banish the picture in her mind of Zachary Grant. He was too handsome. Too vital. Too complicated. Too interesting to her.

Unfortunately, she didn’t have as much actual dating experience as most women her age. First she’d been focused on getting her PhD. Then she’d found that men were intimidated by a woman who’d made human sexuality her specialty.

Well—either intimidated or eager to take advantage of her supposed experience.

She’d sensed that Zachary was nervous. And she’d tried to put him at ease. But perhaps she’d gone about it the wrong way—by babbling about her theories of human sexuality.

Was that why he’d gotten caught going through her dresser drawers? Because he’d wanted to be caught. So she’d throw him out—and that would end the relationship.

That was kind of convoluted thinking. Yet as a psychologist, she knew that people often did things that they couldn’t explain on a conscious level.

Take herself, for example, she thought with a twist of her mouth. She was lying here going into Byzantine psychological explanations for Zachary’s behavior—when she knew what she was really doing was trying to convince her body that thinking about him wasn’t making her hot and tingly.

She might be composing a psych paper in her head, but her nipples were hard, and the hot, swollen feeling between her legs was certainly annoying.

She moved restlessly on the bed, glanced toward the drawer with the vibrator, and then looked quickly away.

What she needed was some nice, calming deep breathing exercises.

Eyes closed, she made herself comfortable on the mattress, then took in a breath and held it for several seconds before slowly letting the air trickle from her lungs.

It had the quieting effect on her senses that she’d hoped for. And she did it again, focusing on the in and out passage of air from her body.

But just as she was about to suck in another breath, a noise outside made her go rigid.

It sounded like someone had knocked over a flower pot on the patio. As she listened intently, her gaze shot to the clock on the bedside table. It was almost midnight.

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